- Frequently Asked Questions
- Petrobras Exploration Permit
- POSTER: “We will not be moving, we will doing some fishing” - click here to download / and here for the Apanui version.
Petrobras is the third largest oil company in the world.
- The corporation is financially backed by the Brazillian government (over 55% shareholding), the US Administration and other key financial supporters (including billionaire George Soros) – the company now has a market capitalisation of over US$228 billion
- Between 1975 – 2001, over 76 million litres of oil has been spilled by Petrobras
- 141 people have been killed as a result of Petrobras incidents:
- In August, 1984 36 workers drowned and 17 were injured in an explosion and fire on a Petrobras oil-drilling platform in the Campos Basin off Brazil.
- In November, 1995 one person died and five were wounded in a Petrobras pipeline fire in Sao Paulo.
- In December, 1998 a fire at Petrobras’s Gabriel Passos Refinery in Minas Gerais killed three workers.
- In 2000, a broken Petrobras pipeline resulted in the biggest oil spill in 25 years — four million liters (1 million gallons), spilled in the Iguacu River. The government fined the company $100 million — less than two days revenues.
- Just months before, a ruptured pipeline at a Petrobras refinery in Rio de Janeiro’s scenic Guanabara Bay resulted in a 350,000 gallon (1.3 million litre) oil spill into the bay, killing hundreds of fish, birds and plants.
- Six months after the Iguacu River spill, a Petrobras refinery near Curitiba in the southern state of Parana resulted in another oil leak, the company’s sixth environmental accident in 2000.
- In January, 2001 two workers died from a fire on a Petrobras offshore natural gas platform in Campos Basin
- P-36 oil platform, the world’s largest floating production platform owned by Petrobras, sank in March 2001. Two explosions on the platform killed 11 employees, and after several days it sank, leaking more than a million litres of oil.
- According to the company’s own data, it was involved in 95 separate ‘incidents’ between January 2000 and March 2001.
- In March 2011 Petrobras encountered a problem during its effort to bring the deepwater Chinook/Cascade oil and gas development in the U.S. Gulf of Mexico on-line, according to U.S. regulators. The Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, Regulation and Enforcement said that a 130 ton buoyancy can broke off one of the tubes connecting oil and gas wells at the bottom of the ocean to a floating production vessel. The buoyancy can is a device that helps keep the tube, known as the riser, at its desired depth – it came close to hitting other drilling operations before being secured. Petrobras reported the incident to BOEMRE on March 23. BOEMRE said that there was no oil present, as the riser was not yet in production. BOEMRE said it is still investigating the incident. Petrobras couldn’t be reached for comment. It’s unclear whether the incident would result in delays in the start-up of the Chinook/Cascade project, which last month received approval from BOEMRE to employ a floating production, storage and offloading vessel in the U.S. Gulf of Mexico for the first time.
- In 2006, after losing a court dispute it had initiated, Petrobras announced it would abandon plans to build a road into an environmentally sensitive region of the Amazon — Yasuni National Park. The company had already built a road through a buffer zone right up to the edge of the park and the company asserted that it has not given up on oil development within the park, saying it will employ helicopters to access the site. ”Allowing Petrobras to drill in Yasuni would be a gross violation of the rights of the Huaorani and Taromenane peoples,” asserts Brian Keane of Land is Life, a Cambridge, Massachusetts-based indigenous rights group.
- This is the corporation that is drilling for oil and gas in our waters!
