Under the Nicolás Maduro regime, Venezuela’s state-owned oil company (PDVSA) has not only collapsed, but lack of investment and maintenance in its facilities generate daily oil spills with devastating consequences for the environment and the population, The New York Times (NYT) reported in late July.
Since 2016, PDVSA stopped reporting operational data, but prior to that date oil spills and incidents were rampant, Spanish magazine Cambio 16 reported. In 2021, NASA’s Earth Observatory estimated that between 2010 and 2016 some 50,000 oil leaks and spills occurred in Venezuela.
“In the country, Venezuelans do not have the opportunity of accessing information, because in a certain way this opacity is already well established,” Emiliano Terán, a researcher at the Center for Development Studies at the Central University of Venezuela, told Diálogo on August 6. “It is concealment of information by the regime’s own regular practice.”
PDVSA, which played a crucial role in the country’s transformation, is suffering the serious impacts of the authoritarian regime’s mismanagement, resulting in serious consequences for both the economy and the environment, the NYT reported.
According to nongovernmental organization Observatory of Political Ecology of Venezuela, there were 86 oil spills in the country in 2022, compared to 73 leaks in 2021. Zulia, Falcón, and Anzoátegui are the states with the highest number of disasters.
The population needs accurate information on spilled volumes, affected areas, and corrective actions, but lacks official data, the Observatory says. “Spills affect entire communities without transparency.”
Lake Maracaibo
“Lake Maracaibo, in Zulia, Venezuela, the largest lake in South America, considered as a source of food, health, and water […], is faced by the oil industry and other factors that do a lot of damage to the lake and the communities,” Terán said.
Oil seeps into the lake from deteriorating pipelines, staining the shores and changing the color of the water to a neon green, the NYT reported. Since June 20, a slick of crude oil caused by the spills has been visible along the lake. This oil slick extends about 3 kilometers along the coast, from the Rafael Urdaneta University to the Pequiven dock, Venezuelan newspaper El Pitazo reported on June 21.
Eduardo Klein-Salas, a remote sensing scientist at Simon Bolivar University in Venezuela, told NASA that the lake “has more than 10,000 oil-related installations and a network of thousands of kilometers of underwater pipelines, most of them 50 years old.”
“The pipelines can be compared to a plate of spaghetti to describe the multiple pipelines in the lake, revealing a tangled complex with daily spills,” Terán added.
In late June, PDVSA announced the start of oil clean-up work on the shores of Maracaibo, without offering further information on the extent of the oil spills, German platform DW reported.
“The regime affirmed that the lake was in good condition and that they were going to clean it up,” Terán said. “But sanitizing the lake is not just taking a cleanup crew, it’s much more. The lake must have a normative and integral sanitation approach.”
Daily spills of 500 to 1,000 barrels of oil and the continuous discharge of more than 10,000 liters per second of wastewater — without any treatment process — pollute the lake, environmental Venezuelan organization Azul Ambientalistas says.
Tremendous impact
These frequent oil spills negatively impact marine ecosystems and contaminate the environment, all caused by PDVSA, Cambio 16 reported. This situation leads to the death of seabirds, fish, and other marine life, the Observatory of Political Ecology said.
“This contamination causes a tremendous impact on biodiversity,” Terán said. “Many families in the lake area are fishermen and they are desperate because they do not have immediate sustenance for their children.”
On the other hand, Venezuela is among the nine countries with the highest emissions of pure methane gas, due to the many flares on oil fields throughout the national territory, Terán pointed out. “Despite its size, its contribution to climate change is significant.”
Allied interests
For Terán, the regime’s current approach is skewed, failing to consider sustainability criteria, and guiding the interests of allies such as China, which participates in the Orinoco oil belt “without an environmental approach and with a lot of opacity.”
Similarly, Iranian companies take part in the Venezuelan oil and gas sector. “If bilateral relations with these countries continue to promote fossil fuels, the environmental situation will become catastrophic,” Terán said.
“Venezuela will inherit from Maduro an environmental disaster that affects its biodiversity and will need billions of dollars and several decades to stop it,” Cambio 16 reported. “The regime is desperate to increase production and is giving free rein, regardless of the consequences for the rest of the planet,” Terán concluded.