According to several NGOs, the oil leak caused by the explosion and fire of a gas production platform began around July 4th. The operating company Pemex acknowledged the leak on Tuesday while calling it “minimal”.
Several NGOs including Greenpeace on Tuesday denounced an oil leak covering 400 km2 in the Gulf of Mexico, near a gas production platform whose explosion and fire killed two workers on July 7.
The leak, attested by satellite images according to NGOs, began around July 4, they said in a statement criticizing the “complete opacity” of the authorities around this oil leak.
A “bad faith estimate” for the operating company
The state company Pemex later in the day admitted a leak, relating to a “volume of hydrocarbons” which is “minimal”. “Most of the spilled volume was recovered immediately,” Pemex added in its statement.
Pemex denounced the “bad faith estimate” of the NGOs: “To be true, more than one and a half million barrels of oil would have had to be spilled”.
Pemex, however, did not mention the satellite images that the associations broadcast. NGOs have pointed to an increase in accident frequency of 152% over the past two years.
Industrial flagship of national sovereignty, Pemex drags a debt of 107.4 billion dollars.
Source: BFM TV
