Colombia's oil industry is being rocked by another scandal focused on environmental misdoings, human rights violations, and unreported oil spills. For decades, a "drill at all costs" mentality dominated Colombia’s domestic politics, allowing energy companies, especially national oil company Ecopetrol, to operate with impunity. While that permitted Colombia to become a leading regional oil producer, it led to severe environmental harm and civil conflict. Industry insiders and environmental activists allege Ecopetrol is systematically failing to report and rectify oil spills, which are polluting waterbodies, grasslands, and forests. Critics argue that for decades, Colombia’s national government in the capital, Bogota, tacitly permitted Ecopetrol to operate in such a manner.
Since the late-1990s, allegations have frequently emerged that there is little to no transparency around the reporting, monitoring and remediation of environmentally damaging incidents caused by Colombia’s hydrocarbon sector. Environmental activists and private think tanks regularly accuse Colombia’s national government of failing to ensure the existence of a robust reporting system capable of effectively tracking oil spills and their remediation. A 2022 article from non-profit environmental publisher Mongabay alleged there were significant deficiencies (Spanish) in the government system used to report, track, and monitor oil spills, particularly the prompt clean-up of such incidents.
To understand what is responsible for the alleged systemic failure to monitor oil spills, Mongabay analyzed industry data sourced from Colombia’s environmental watchdog the National Environmental Licensing Authority (ANLA). This data showed Ecopetrol, which is 88.49% owned by Colombia’s government, was responsible for 67% of all environmentally damaging incidents reported between 2015 and 2022. The second largest polluter, guilty of 10% of recorded oil spills, is Mansarovar Energy Colombia, an equal joint venture between Beijing-controlled Sinopec and ONGC Videsh, an arm of India’s national oil company ONGC.
A key issue identified by Mongabay is the inconsistent reporting of oil spills. Specifically, there was a sharp increase in environmentally damaging events recorded between 2016 and 2021. Data indicates that only 37 incidents were registered with ANLA in 2016, which is considerably lower than the 437 events documented during 2021. This discrepancy raises concerns about whether energy companies are adequately reporting and rectifying spills as well as other environmentally damaging incidents. More worrying are signs the environmental watchdog is not effectively tracking ecologically damaging incidents to ensure proper clean-up and remediation.
ANLA assured stakeholders that the discrepancies arose because of the implementation of stricter monitoring standards due to the introduction of Resolution 1767 of 2016 (Spanish) by the Ministry of Environment and Sustainable Development. Colombia’s top environmental authority required stricter monitoring of oil industry operations with the resolution obligating ANLA to enhance the reporting, recording, and supervision of oil spills. Colombia’s environmental watchdog claimed this was responsible for the spike in incidents recorded after 2016, although serious doubts about the credibility of oil spill reporting in Colombia remain.
According to prominent environmental activist Óscar Sampayo, who directs the Extractive and Environmental Studies Group of the Middle Magdalena, there are significant problems with the monitoring system. The political scientist was quoted by Mongabay as saying:
"The official information on spills, incidents and operational failures in Colombia raises several questions. First, if there is an underreporting of the information. Second, if the oil companies provide truthful and timely information about the spills. And third, if the institutions and environmental authorities have the tools to verify or corroborate the information provided by the oil companies,"
The latest explosive developments indicate Mongabay’s findings are not an isolated example but part of a broader industry-wide systemic issue. Late last month, the UK’s national broadcaster, the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) released a documentary where a former Ecopetrol employee turned whistleblower accused the state-controlled energy company of serious pollution. Andrés Olarte joined Ecopetrol in 2017, working until 2019 as an adviser to then CEO Felipe Bayó,n who left the company in 2023. Olarte alleges Colombia’s national oil company knowingly polluted hundreds of operational sites and failed to report a fifth of known oil spills to the authorities.
According to the BBC, Olarte provided data from January 2019, confirmed to be from an Ecopetrol server, that identified 839 unresolved incidents with noted environmental impacts. The whistleblower claimed that this demonstrates that Ecopetrol failed to adequately rectify and decontaminate those sites with high levels of hydrocarbon contamination still present in the soil and/or water at those locations. Many of those incidents are clustered around the city of Barrancabermeja, home to Colombia’s largest oil refinery. Olarte claims Ecopetrol is concealing spills with at least a fifth not reported to Colombian authorities. These developments imply the state-controlled energy company is covering up spills to avoid costly fines and remediation.
Olarte’s allegations come after Colombian environmental activists, for at least a decade, have alleged a myriad of oil spills in the country are being concealed and left unrectified for years or even decades. There are signs that oil spills and other ecologically damaging incidents are inadequately or only partially cleaned up, leaving significant hydrocarbon contamination at impacted sites. This is highlighted by a March 2018 oil spill which affected 24 km of the Lizama River, killing 2,400 animals and seriously impacting the health of 70 families. The severity of the incident was blamed on botched emergency planning by Ecopetrol (Spanish), with concerns voiced by Colombia’s Minister of the Environment that Ecopetrol could have concealed information about the spill.
Along with the locations disclosed by Olarte, there are a multitude of other such places scattered across Colombia, with many concentrated in the Middle Magdalena Valley, a region long at the epicenter of the oil industry. The region’s key municipality, Barrancabermeja, situated on Colombia’s largest waterway, the Magdalena River, has long been recognized as the capital of the Andean country’s oil industry. It is here at the dawn of the twentieth century in the Middle Magdalena Valley that Colombia’s oil boom began. The pivotal moment was the 1916 founding of Tropical Oil, which was awarded the De Mares concession situated near Barrancabermej,a where the company hit pay dirt with the 1918 discovery of oil at the La Cira-Infantas field.
This event attracted considerable interest from U.S. oil barons. Consequently, in January 1920, Tropical Oil and its 2 million acres around the city of Barrancabermeja was acquired by International Petroleum Company, a subsidiary of John D. Rockefeller’s Standard Oil, for $40 million. That acreage, where Colombia’s largest oil refinery was eventually built, became a modern, humming U.S.-style city while a haphazard settlement riddled with violence, crime and poverty grew up around the high wire fence. In 1952, when Standard Oil’s lucrative Colombian concession expired, Bogota nationalized the operation, which was assumed by then national oil company Empresa Colombiana de Petróleos, Ecopetrol’s predecessor.
The discovery of La Cira-Infantas was followed by a swathe of major oil discoveries over the next century, establishing Colombia as a top oil producer in Latin America. By the late 1970s, leftist guerrillas were targeting petroleum infrastructure as part of their fight against the state, which relied on oil revenues, and ideological aversion to foreign exploitation of Colombia’s natural resources. By the 1980s, the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) and the National Liberation Army (ELN) found that extorting money from energy companies provided a lucrative source of income. Barrancabermeja's central role in Colombia’s oil industry, combined with the city’s severe poverty, which created an ideal recruiting ground for the guerrillas, led to the FARC and ELN forming strongholds in the area.
The growing importance of the oil industry as a significant driver of economic growth for Colombia during the 1990s prompted Bogota to deploy the military to battle the guerrillas and seize complete control of Barrancabermeja and its hinterlands. Colombia’s armed forces found they were incapable of fully securing the Andean country’s oil heartland against the socialist insurgents. This resulted in Barrancabermeja being rocked for years by chronic violence as security forces, leftist guerrillas, and eventually right-wing paramilitaries clashed for control of the economically crucial city.
As the bloodshed intensified, serious allegations emerged about Colombia’s domestic intelligence agency (known by its Spanish initials as the DAS) and armed forces, along with Ecopetrol cooperating with and arming rightwing death squads. Those events triggered a campaign, which many insiders claim was sponsored by the DAS, the military, and Ecopetrol, to persecute any person thought to possess socially progressive and leftist tendencies. Upon arriving in Barrancabermeja, government-backed paramilitary forces initiated a campaign of social cleansing that saw labor leaders, environmentalists, journalists, and lawyers targeted for kidnapping, forced displacement and even assassination.
Those bloodthirsty events forged an atmosphere of fear, allowing Ecopetrol and Colombia’s oil industry to operate with a sense of impunity regardless of any environmental or social damage caused by operations. For these reasons, energy companies were able to get away with failing to report and rectify costly, environmentally damaging incidents for decades. While violence has plummeted over the last 20 years, especially after the dismantling of paramilitary organizations, a sense of fear pervades Colombia, which is the world's most dangerous country for environmental defenders. Recent Ecopetrol whistleblower Andrés Olarte and his family were subjected to such serious death threats that he fled the country into exile.
By Matthew Smith for Oilprice.com
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