EcoLur
The Caspian seals became the first victims of the Kashagan oil and gas field development project. According to the specialists, from 1000 to 5000 seals were killed only in 2010. This report was made by Oksana Shahnazaryan presented at International Oil and Gas Conference held in Prague on 7 February. The conference was organized by CEE Bankwatch Network, Crude Accountability with the support of EU via Visegrad Fund.
More frequently the victims are seal pups and their mothers, as the mine area includes the territory where the seals have bear and give birth to their pups. The consortium is aware of this problem corroborated by the materials of “International Studies of Caspian Seal – Report on Impact Assessment of Icebreakers in 2010” closed report (№ CISS-AR-002-2010 dated in January 2011). Thus, according to the assessment of scientific group headed by Sue Wilson and Simon Goodman working with Agip KCO on contractual basis, one passage of an ice-breaker causes the death of 20 seals on average. Besides, a part of the ships scares animals, and seal mothers and their pups turns out to be scattered to different sides. And if after the passage of ships mother seals can’t find their pups, the latter inevitable die. The shares of Kashagan project are equally owned by five companies - Shell (UK - Netherlands), ExxonMobil (USA), ENI (Italy), Total FinaElf (France) and KazMunaiGaz each by 16.81%. The participants of the project are still formally Inpex Masela Ltd. (Japan) and Konokophilips – 8.4%.
February 11, 2013 at 14:14