Madrid authorises oil prospecting in Canaries

[aspasia]

Original news is about "imminent permission" to conduct oil prospecting off Lanzarote ...

And the authorisation has come far earlier than expected with publication in today's BOE (Boletín Oficial del Estado). Repsol has now been given official permission to carry out oil prospecting in the sea between Lanzarote and Morocco. This official announcement has been coming for a few days and has resulted in great consternation in the Canarian Government, with President Rivero saying he'll fight this tooth and nail.

Suspicions are rife, too, that this has been rushed through by Madrid in order to preempt any legal measures the Canaries could initiate to stop the prospecting before it had started. The Canarian President, backed inevitably by green groups and political parties of other hues as well as Greenpeace, says it will have an adverse effect on tourism and that any oil spill would spell the end for the Canaries. This is going to run and run ... JAA

[aspasia]

Protests have taken place throughout the Canaries against Madrid's approval for oil exploration off the eastern Canary Islands. The numbers are disputed, as protest statistics always are, with President Rivero claiming an excellent turnout, but police saying far fewer. In Tenerife, some 1,000 gathered outside national government offices, but there were far more who took to the streets in Fuerteventura and Lanzarote. There, organizers say 35,000 gathered to protest, though police put the number at 12,000.

The meaninglessness of the given numbers is shown by the Gran Canaria protest, where organizers said 15,000 people turned out in Las Palmas but where the official number was given as 1,500. To a very large extent, these figures are  politically massaged and motivated ... rather like the protests themselves ... and if anything will stop the drilling, it will be the Canarian Government's legal proceedings against Madrid, which will have to succeed if Repsol is to be prevented from starting work as authorized by royal decree. JAA

[aspasia]

The Canarian Government has lost two judgements from the Canarian High Court in as many days. On Monday, the Court rejected an appeal to annul the authorization given to Repsol to carry out soundings off the eastern islands, and yesterday it again found against the authorities in their appeal to stop the works proceeding. The High Court not only refused to paralize the works, but added that the national interest was more important than that of the region. Its judgement ruled that there was no risk to the islands in carrying out the soundings and, moreover, that it could represent a source of wealth for Spain in general. JA

[Nova]

Check your spelling, paralyze or paralyse, but either way it's a "y"   

[aspasia]

bugger ... it's "paralizado" that's the fault!! Have changed to paralyse ... 

[Nova]

   Thought that might be the reason 

[Janet]

German company RWE Dea AG, which along with Woodside (Australia) and Repsol is conducting soundings for oil off the eastern Canary islands, has estimated that there is a supply of around 1,390 million barrels in the Aaiun-Tarfaya oil field to the east of Lanzarote and Fuerteventura. The report says that the field can be considered as a northern extension of recent discoveries of oil deposits in Mauritania, Liberia and Sierra Leone from the Tertiary and Cretaceous eras: this dating apparently indicates that the oil will be of a high quality.  Exploration, the next stage after prospection, is expected to start in the second half of 2014. JA

[Michael]

There goes the neighborhood. 

[Janet]

This is a diagram of the area of the fields ... I know we know where "east of Fuerteventura and Lanzarote" is, but this also gives the extent, and the scale.

[poker]

Next on the agenda OIL war with Marocco if they find a fortune of if ?