First Yasuní oil well shuts down but activists say the government is violating referendum results

Ecuador’s Energy Ministry on Wednesday began the process of shutting down oil wells in block ITT-43, located in Yasuní National Park in the country’s Amazon region. The action follows passage a year ago by voters of a referendum ending oil production in area that has been called the most biodiverse on earth.

The first of 247 oil wells has shut down in the Ishpingo field in Yasuní National Park, the government announced on Wednesday.

The energy ministry said in a statement that it closed one of the 247 wells in the block, the Ishpingo B-56 well, part of a plan expected to take five years and possibly longer.

Environmental groups that supported the referendum are demanding that the dismantling of Yasuní wells be completed much sooner, pointing out that referendum language required the process be completed within one year. The Yasunidos Collective, a Cuenca-based group that sponsored the referendum, said they will take the case to the Constitutional Court to force the government to comply.

Meanwhile, current and former energy ministry officials claim the language of the referendum did not consider the difficulty of ending oil operations in block ITT-43. Oil industry analyst Luis Calero and former deputy energy ministry called the demands of the referendum “illogical” and said they cannot be complied with. “The voters were misled by the wording of the referendum question, and it could require as long as 10 years and hundreds of millions of dollars to complete the shutdown,” he said.

The Constitutional Court ruled last year that state-owned Petroecuador had one year to end production and remove infrastructure at the block, although Energy Ministry officials say they have presented documentation to the court to extend the process. “Complying with the closure of ITT is not an easy job, it requires special and technical planning,” Energy Minister Antonio Goncalves said in the statement.

Petroecuador has pumped about 50,000 barrels per day (bpd) at 43-ITT since operations began in 2016, about 11% of the country’s total oil production. Total production amounts to 480,000 bpd a day, according to official data.

The government has put the cost of ending operations at the block 43 at $1.3 billion.

The seven Indigenous communities who live on the Yasuní reserve, the largest in Ecuador’s Amazon rainforest, will also stop receiving the legally mandated funds from Petroecuador for drilling at the site. Most of the communities, however, support the shutdown, claiming oil production has adversely affected their way of life.

In the document submitted the court, the government says all wells should all go offline by December 2029, but that removing all infrastructure could take another year.