Ecuador
declares state of emergency in oil producing region
AFP/File/Santiago Armas
Employees
of Ecuador's Petroecuador oil company work on clean up operations
after an oil spillage. Protesters demanding a bigger cut in oil
profits for the Amazon region have taken over a privately owned
pipeline pumping station, even as another group abandoned another
government-owned pumping station
By Elio Ohep
CARACAS
Petroleumworld.com 02 23 06
Ecuador's President Alfredo Palacio declared
a state of emergency in the country's Amazon oil Napo region where
protestors have taken over oil industry facilities demanding a
percentages of oil royalties for their Amazon areas, national
and international news agencies reported.
Ecuador's
private OCP crude pipeline suspended operations on Tuesday at
2247 GMT, after protesters, violently took Sardinas Station, OCP
Spokeswoman Isabel Ortiz told Dow Jones Newswires Tuesday.
OCP
is one of the Ecuador's two main oil pipelines with capacity of
450,000 barrels a day and transport at present around 130,000
b/d.of 22 degrees API crude. It delivers the crude oil from the
Amazon jungle to the Pacific coast for the US-based Occidental
Petroleum, Spain's Repsol and Canada's Encana.
Goverment
have s deploy troops to guard the all pumping stations of the
pipeline system on the Amazon region.
"We're
reinforcing the number of troops deployed to guard the pumping
stations in the east, to protect the two (oil) lines, and we're
making efforts to restore the pumping operations," Administration
Secretary Modesto Apolo said.
Apolo
said acts of "vandalism" by the protestors was causing
daily losses of 15 million dollars
A
spokesman for the consortium told AFP Tuesday that the takeover
"did not affect yet" the crude exports of the companies
that share the line, but did affect the delivery of the equivalent
of 160,000 barrels of crude.
Ortiz
told Dow Jones Newswires that it doesn't rule out the possibility
that OCP could declare a force majeure on its crude oil exports
in the few next hours.
"We are studying the situation and in the next hour, we will
make a decision", Ortiz said.
The same protesters took the country's SOTE oil pipeline on Monday,
which obligated Petroecuador to stop operations for about 16 hours,
and forcing it to declared a force majeure on crude oil exports
Monday, but lifted the force majeure Tuesday afternoon.
``Protests have halted while government officials meet with local
leaders to look for a solution,'' Interior Ministry spokesman
Rigoberto Medina said to Bloomberg News in a phone interview from
the capital.
``This
was a plan prepared beforehand to the millimeter,'' Administration
Secretary Jose Modesto Apolo told reporters, according to Quito
daily El Comercio. ``We're up against a subversive plan.''
Police
arrested 11 protesters including the regional prefect and mayor
for breaking a curfew, police director Gen. Jose Vinueza said.
The
shutdown is the latest attack by residents against oil facilities
in a continuing protest to boost government spending in the Amazon
region, where most of Ecuador's oil is pumped.
Ecuador
is South America's fifth-largest petroleum producer and was the
11th-largest crude supplier to the U.S. in November, according
to the U.S. Department of Energy.
Ecuador
shipped about 264,000 barrels a day to the U.S. in November, according
to U.S. Energy Department statistics.
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By Elio Ohep, editor@petroleumworld.com, 58 412 996 3730, Caracas.
Petroleumworld News 02 22 06
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