Oil extracted from the Amazon is exported around the world, but 66% goes to the US, and the majority of that goes to one state in particular. Published in partnership with pulitzercenter
This article was produced in partnership with the Pulitzer Center’s Rainforest Investigations Network.
Over the past 50 years, oil companies have extracted immense amounts of crude from the Amazon, causing the destruction of rainforest crucial to slowing climate change and jeopardizing the Indigenous tribes who rely on it.Carlos Noriega for NBC News “This is no longer one of those things where we’re supposed to have sympathy for a crisis that’s happening somewhere else,” said Angeline Robertson, a senior researcher at Stand.earth and the lead author of the report. “It’s occurring in California, and it’s linked to Amazon destruction.”Oil drilling in the Ecuadorian Amazon began in the 1960s with the promise of bringing prosperity to the coastal South American nation.
Oil exploration began here in the 1970s, but in 2007 then-President Rafael Correa proposed a novel plan to protect the rainforest from drilling. He called on the international community to donate about $3.5 billion — roughly half of the revenue Ecuador estimated it would have earned from mining the oil under Yasuní. But the plan was abandoned six years later, after Ecuador raised less than 10 percent of the target figure.
“It’s a recipe for climate disaster to be looking for new oil and felling standing forest to get at it,” Koenig said. “It’s sort of a double whammy that everybody should be really worried about.” “The contamination can reach a circumference of 300 meters [330 yards], and this affects the groundwater and rivers used by nearby communities,” Solis said.
Ecuador has sold oil exploration rights in and around Yasuní National Park to a consortium of Chinese state-owned oil companies despite fierce opposition from Indigenous groups and environmentalists. Last year alone some 70 million barrels of oil from the Amazon rainforest in Ecuador flowed to the U.S., making it the largest global consumer by far. Panama was second followed by Chile and China , according to the report.
The report’s researchers tracked shipments of oil from beneath the Amazon to the U.S. and beyond by combing through records from the U.S. Energy Information Administration, the United Nations Comtrade database and import/export databases for Ecuador, Colombia, Peru, Brazil and the U.S. Motorists also purchase oil from the Amazon at supermarket fueling stations at places like Costco, Safeway and Walmart. Those companies also use them for their fleets. Last year Costco was the top consumer of Amazon oil , the report said.
NBC News reached out to all of the companies named in this story. Delta was the only one to comment, saying the company is working to move away from jet fuel to sustainable aviation fuel and hopes to make it 10 percent of the overall fuel supply by 2030.
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