How long do you think the oil would stay there if there really is such
a thing as peak oil?
Gene Coyle
In Ecuador, an Unusual Carbon-Credit Plan to
Leave Oil Untapped
By Joshua Partlow
Washington Post Foreign Service
Tuesday, May 26, 2009
QUITO, Ecuador -- Beneath the tropical jungles of northeastern Ecuador
lies a vast
pool of oil, representing one-fifth of the small Andean country's
petroleum reserves
and potentially billions of dollars in revenue. Directly above that
pool, the Yasuni
National Park is home to a diversity of wildlife that is among the
richest on the
planet, Ecuadoran and U.S. biologists say.
Faced with these two treasures, Ecuador is pursuing an unusual plan to
reap the oil
profits without actually drilling for oil.
The idea envisions wealthy countries effectively paying Ecuador to
leave its oil --
and the carbon dioxide that would result from using it -- in the ground.
Environmentalists hail the proposal as a potentially precedent-setting
approach to
conservation in developing countries.
Ecuador would sell certificates to governments or companies that would
allow them
to emit carbon dioxide in amounts corresponding to the carbon left
underground in
Yasuni. Proponents say the plan would help reduce overall levels of
air pollution.
"From my perspective, this has got to work," said Matt Finer, a
biologist with
Washington-based Save America's Forests, who has studied Yasuni
National Park.
"This area is really of just supreme global conservation importance."
Similar ideas have become increasingly popular across South America.
Brazil has
developed an Amazon Fund, which seeks to attract money to conserve the
rain
forest-- so far, Norway has pledged up to $1 billion over the next
several years. The
Japanese government recently agreed to lend Peru $120 million to
protect 212,000
square miles of Amazonian rain forest over the next decade. And
Colombia is
seeking funds from Norway to combat climate change by protecting
forests.
But relying on other countries to send cash to save remote jungles has
run into
repeated obstacles, including a lack of clarity on what exactly they
would be buying,
how the money would be spent and, in the case of Ecuador, how the Yasuni
certificates could be sold on carbon markets. Plus, the global
economic crisis has
made funding scarcer for environmental causes.
"One of the issues that is difficult to handle in this financial
crisis is to ask
governments for taxpayers' money," said Roque Sevílla, a prominent
Ecuadoran
environmentalist who is on the committee in charge of the Yasuni
initiative. "So
that's a huge problem. That's another reason we're trying to go to the
carbon
market."
Sevílla said that focusing on carbon could save Yasuni. The 410
million tons of
carbon dioxide that would avoid being emitted could raise $4 billion
to $7 billion,
Ecuador estimates.
European countries could accept the Yasuni certificates as an
equivalent to the
carbon allowances traded on the European Energy Exchange in Leipzig,
Germany.
The exchange is a market for energy products such as electricity and
natural gas,
as well as carbon dioxide emissions rights. But such an arrangement is
not allowed
under the rules of the 1997 Kyoto Protocol, aimed at curbing
greenhouse gas
emissions -- a treaty the United States rejected. Ecuadorans say they
hope this
type of pilot project could be embraced under climate change rules to
be formulated
at a meeting in Copenhagen in December, Sevílla said.
"The benefit to the planet is not that we leave the oil underground.
That has no
benefit. The benefit is the C02 that we keep underground," he said.
"So the idea is:
try to obtain a compensation not for the oil but for the carbon."
The money from selling carbon-emission certificates would go to a
trust fund
managed by international organizations. The interest would be spent on
protecting
national parks and funding alternative energy projects and other
environmental
initiatives.
Germany has expressed the most support for the Yasuni project. The
German
Parliament passed a resolution in June in favor of the project and has
funded a
study to outline how it might work. Ute Koczy, a lawmaker from the
opposition
Green Party, who traveled to Ecuador as part of a delegation studying
the issue,
said other countries, particularly the United States, should help find
ways to
support such a proposal.
"The Ecuadoran proposal is still unique. There is no other proposal
like it worldwide.
That makes it kind of difficult to find support," she said. "Ecuador's
president is
getting very impatient and may give the whole area to [the Spanish oil
and gas
company] Repsol or to China or somebody else. He's under big pressure
from the
oil companies."
Attacking climate change in this way could prove effective because it
simultaneously addresses the two main drivers of greenhouse gas
emissions --
fossil fuels and deforestation, said Thomas E. Lovejoy, president of
the H. John
Heinz III Center for Science, Economics and the Environment, based in
Washington.
"It really goes straight at the heart of the distortion of the global
carbon cycle," said
Lovejoy, who in the 1980s invented a policy tool known as debt-for-
nature swaps.
"I find it imaginative and encouraging that there is a government that
would be
even willing to consider foregoing using a natural resource like that."
Ecuadoran officials said their country's history of oil-driven
environmental
degradation helped lay the political ground for such a measure.
"The petroleum activity in the northeastern Amazon has been the cause,
directly or
indirectly, of a vast process of devastation in the region," said
Alberto Acosta, a
former minister of mines and energy who helped develop the initial
Yasuni proposal.
"The worrisome thing is also that the Amazon provinces have more
poverty and
misery than the rest of the country. You have to do something so you
don't repeat
this situation," he said.
Acosta's 2007 plan sought to attract international funding to equal
the revenue the
country would forgo by not drilling for oil, a simpler, if more vague,
approach. Since
then, he said, President Rafael Correa has vacillated over whether he
supports the
idea or favors drilling for oil. "These ambiguities threaten the
project," Acosta said.
Juan Fernando Terán, an environmental professor at the Simón Bolívar
Andean
University in Quito, Ecuador's capital, said the project's designers
have failed to
clearly explain the benefits of protecting the Amazon, its rich
biodiversity and its
role in regulating air and water currents far from this country.
"If I knock on your door in California and tell you, 'Help me with a
little money to
improve the air in South America' -- well, why? South America wouldn't
matter to
you," he said. "But Yasuni is much more than a museum."
Others said Ecuador made it more difficult by proposing to save a
national park,
which, in theory, should already be protected.
"That kind of muddied the argument," said Joe Keenan, managing
director of the
Latin America region for the Nature Conservancy. "My impression is
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