To Drill or Not to Drill:
Tags: Fracking, Amazon, Amazon Rainforest, Environment, Environmental Issues

Oil rigs are the structures that drill for petroleum under the Earth’s surface and this technology dates back to the Chinese in year 347. Petroleum is “a raw oil that is obtained from wells drilled in the ground and that is the source of gasoline, kerosene, and other oils used for fuel.” Access to petroleum is gained through a drilling process which creates an oil well underground. Furthermore, five varieties of wells exist: exploration wells, appraisal wells, development wells, relief wells, and injection wells.

With the assistance of a geologist, an exploratory well is a well that is drilled in a new area to “explore” land that may have oil potential. Appraisal wells are drilled to access information about an already known petroleum reserve; this well is utilized to study the flow rate or quality of the reserve. After appraisal drilling, development wells (also known as production wells) are drilled to optimize production near a proven reserve. Relief wells are created to stop the flow in a well that is experiencing a blowout. A blowout occurs when the release of crude oil and natural gas is uncontrolled. Blowouts are not rare, though measures like relief drilling have been put in place to help prevent these predicaments. Currently, complete prevention of blowouts is technologically impossible. On the next page, you will find a sample index of documented oil blowouts in the Alaska OCS Region within the United States from the September of 1980 to the April of 2010. This report does not include undocumented oil blowouts and shows us that there is at least one oil spillage due to oil rig blowouts every year except 1984, 1986, and 2005. The spillage of each accident uses the measurement of barrels (bbl) where one barrel of oil equals 42 gallons. In injection wells, fluids are inserted in a well rather than drawn out, the objective of injection drilling is to maintain reservoir pressure of a nearby well.

Land is cleared to develop space not only for the oil rig, but also for roads to access the platform. Paco, an Ecuadorian citizen whose land was found to be oil rich, confirmed that the oil company — Schlumberger — purchased 6 acres of his land to utilize for their oil rig. Paco lives in Yasuni National Park, which scientists at the Smithsonian Institute quote: “may be the most biologically diverse place on the planet.” When land is cleared, there are no reports to confirm the safe transfer of current endangered species, both flora and fauna, in that specific area. The US National Library of Medicine and National Institutes of Health report:

“Using field inventory data, we compared Yasuní’s local (alpha) and landscape (gamma) diversity to other sites, in the western Amazon and globally. These analyses further suggest that Yasuní is among the most biodiverse places on Earth, with apparent world richness records for amphibians, reptiles, bats, and trees. Yasuní also protects a considerable number of threatened species and regional endemics.”

Now, you may be thinking, “How do oil companies like Schlumberger know that they are not accidently killing off endangered species in their process of building an oil rig?” The answer is: “They don’t.”

When I asked Paco about the expansion of oil drilling in the Ecuadorian Amazonian rainforest, he confirms that this particular rig on his land is only one of 120. This means 119 more oil rigs are underway, each taking up approximately 6 acres of land that will be deforested which equals about 720 total acres. He also tells me that the oil companies offer the Ecuadorian government a percentage of the money from the taken oil. Foreign oil companies, like Schlumberger, offer also the residents of Yasuni National Park small, modernized bathrooms and place them on their property. I have seen these bathrooms, with the label “PetroAmazonas,” you will find photo evidence of these bathrooms below: