After the two hydrocarbon spills suffered by the German company Oiltanking Ebytem in less than a month in the Bahía Blanca estuary, near the port of Coronel Rosales, the refineries located around the city of Buenos Aires will stop producing 150 million liters of diesel which the field will need for the intense harvesting campaign that will begin in the next few weeks and last until April.
The fuel volume is slightly more than 10% of the diesel required monthly.
Oiltanking Ebytem had two environmental incidents within days of each other December 26th and January 17th. For this reason, after the second episode, his activity was suspended by the Ministry of the Environment of the province of Buenos Aires and the prosecutor’s office opened a judicial investigation.
And although the Buenos Aires Ministry of the Environment lifted the preventive closure on January 22, Oiltanking Ebytem is operating with only one of the two monobuoys that the company must unload the crude oil that arrives by ship from the south of the country and that it must be injected into the pipelines to pump it to the peripheral refineries of the city of Buenos Aires.
Already in January the refineries stopped receiving 170,000 m3 of crude oil. For February, however, the drop in volumes that Oiltanking itself has already communicated to the companies will be 103,000 m3 of oil.
Environmental impact
In addition to the economic damage, there was a possible environmental impact resulting from the spills. This is why the actions of the Ministry of the Environment. Five days after the second accident and after having revoked the preventive closure, the organization released a statement in which it highlighted that “in light of the repair of the fault that affected the monobuoy and the certification by the National Secretariat of Energy and Naval Prefecture, the suspension of operations that had previously been closed has been lifted.”
In this sense, they specified that on Saturday 20 January at 8.30 pm the organization “received a communication from Oiltanking Ebytem SA informing that it had completed the repair of the fault that affected its Punta Cigüeña monobuoy”.
“The nation’s Ministry of Energy and the Naval Prefecture have formally certified that there are no technical objections to resuming the operation, and the province’s Ministry of the Environment has been asked to lift the closure,” the agency added.
The Ministry also specified that the oil company “has been ordered to very quickly implement the plan for the reclamation of the natural heritage affected by this completely unprecedented event of two consecutive episodes of hydrocarbon spills”.
“After the authorization of Oiltanking Ebytem’s operations, the staff of the Province’s Ministry of the Environment will remain permanently on the affected site, taking all measures to ensure complete remediation and compensation by the company,” the statement added official.
The agency recalled that “in recent weeks two hydrocarbon spills have been detected in the Bahía Blanca estuary, near the port of Coronel Rosales, due to the leaks of the monobuoys of the Oiltanking Ebytem company”.
“In response to the first event, which affected part of the Bahía Blanca, Bahía Falsa and Bahía Verde Reserves, the Ministry of the Environment of the Province ordered Oiltanking Ebytem SA to present and start the Emergency Plan and the first sanitization of the affected areas . , “the Reclamation Plan and sanctions were applied for failure to comply with Law 11.723, article 3, section B and Law 10.907 on the protection of Natural Reserves”, it is specified.
Furthermore, the agency noted that “the Water Authority sanctioned the company for violating Article 103 of Law 12.257.”
For its part, the oil company itself specified in a latest press release that “the repair of the damage that affected its Punta Cigüeña monobuoy on January 17 has been completed”.
“All work carried out has been documented according to current safety parameters, certified by inspectors from the RINA Classification Society,” the company said.
Source: Clarin
