Offshore staff
LONDON, UK -- According to Greenpeace, the federal prosecutor of the state of Amapá in Brazil has recommended suspending environmental licensing granted to BP and Total for their planned deepwater drilling campaign in the area of the Amazon River mouth.
The prosecutor has intervened withIBAMA, Brazil’s regulator responsible for issuing environmental licenses, and will reportedly take legal action to suspend the licensing process if IBAMA rejects or fails to respond to its concerns within 10 days.
If IBAMA accepts the prosecutor’s assessment,BP and Total will have to embark on a new Environmental Impact Assessment.
The main issues raised by the prosecutor are possible risks to the Amazon Reef, which it claims have not yet been adequately documented, and to the coastlines of neighboring countries to the north, which could be exposed to anoil spill.
According to Greenpeace, the intervention follows IBAMA’s recent decision to reject BP’s and Total’s oil spill modeling on the grounds that “it does not adequately represent the environmental variability of the region”and because the two companies failed to comply with previous requests for information.
5/10/2017
