Oil task near Amazon River mouth blocked by Brazil’s environment company

RIO DE JANEIRO (AP) — Brazil’s environmental regulator refused on Wednesday to grant a license for a controversial offshore oil drilling challenge in the vicinity of the mouth of the Amazon River, prompting celebration from environmentalists who had warned of its opportunity impact.

The conclusion to reject the point out-run oil business Petrobras’ ask for to drill the FZA-M-59 block was made “as a operate of a group of technical inconsistencies,” reported the agency’s president, Rodrigo Agostinho, who highlighted environmental worries.

With Brazil’s present generation established to peak in coming decades, Petrobras has sought to safe extra reserves off Brazil’s northern coast. The business earmarked just about 50 % its 5-yr, $6 billion exploration finances for the place.

CEO Jean Paul Prates had mentioned that the to start with nicely would be short term and that the firm has never recorded a leak in offshore drilling. The firm unsuccessful to persuade the environmental agency.

“There is no question that Petrobras was offered just about every possibility to treatment critical points of its job, but that it nevertheless presents worrisome inconsistencies for the harmless procedure in a new exploratory frontier with significant socioenvironmental vulnerability,” Agostinho wrote in his selection.

The special and biodiverse area is property to minor-examined swaths of mangroves and a coral reef, and activists and professionals experienced claimed the venture risked leaks that could imperil the sensitive natural environment.

Eighty civil modern society and environmental businesses, together with WWF Brasil and Greenpeace, had identified as for the license to be rejected pending an in-depth examine.

“Agostinho is defending a practically unfamiliar ecosystem and maintains the coherence of the Lula authorities, which has promised in its discourse to be guided by the struggle versus the local weather crisis,” the Local weather Observatory, a network of environmental non-revenue, claimed in a assertion.

Throughout the to start with presidential conditions of Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, from 2003 to 2010, substantial offshore discoveries became a signifies of funding well being, education and learning and welfare packages. Some users of his Workers’ Occasion proceed to see oil as a suggests to make certain social progress.

Electricity Minister Alexandre Silveira explained in March that the area is the “passport to the future” for growth in Brazil’s northern area. In his prior phrases, Lula used the exact same phrase to explain the offshore oil discoveries in an location recognised as pre-salt.

But Lula has strived to display the environmental awakening he has undergone in the many years due to the fact, with defense of the Amazon a fixture in his campaign last calendar year to unseat Jair Bolsonaro and return to the presidency.

Activists and professionals had warned that approval for the offshore oil project could threaten the normal entire world, but also dent Lula’s newfound graphic as an environmental defender.

The process to get hold of an environmental license for the FZA-M-59 block began in 2014, at the ask for of BP Energy do Brasil. Exploration legal rights were being transferred to Petrobras in 2020.

Suely Araújo, a former head of the environment agency and now a community policy expert with the Local weather Observatory, reported Agostinho made the appropriate contact not just for the specific task, but also for the nation.

“The choice in this scenario gives bring about for a broader debate about the role of oil in the country’s foreseeable future. It is time to set up a calendar to reduce fossil fuels and speed up the just transition for oil exporting nations, this kind of as Brazil, and not open up a new exploration frontier,” Araújo explained in a assertion. “Those who sleep right now dreaming of oil prosperity tend to wake up tomorrow with a stranded asset, or an ecological catastrophe, or equally.”

Other controversial megaprojects in the Amazon that stay on the table involve repaving a highway that would slice by preserved rainforest, design of a key railway for grain transport and renewal of a big hydroelectric dam’s license.

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Affiliated Push writer Eléonore Hughes in Rio de Janeiro contributed to this report.