From my conversations with Dominican locals I find that it is generally believed that the Dominican Republic has large reserves of untapped crude oil, but the government has chosen not to go after it. In my reading and research on this I haven?t been able to find anything that backs up this rumor. Could it be true?
- Thread starter azabache
- Start date
Dominican Oil Reserves?
Back in the late 19th century my great grandfather, Sim?n Romero Navarro, was given the first official concession to exploit an oil well in Azua (I have the document). Only a couple of hundred meters from my compound in the foothills north of Azua, there's an area (Los Borbollones) where petroleum is permanently bubbling up. Then further uphill oil is oozing from an old well, which at one time was exploited by El Jefe himself, and then across the river (Jura), there's another oil well (Maleno), where I've seen tankers fill up with the stuff. There is oil in DR territory, however what is lacking is the will and incentive to exploit it. Politicians and the Shell company have conspired to avoid the exploitation of DR oil, since their current business of importing and distributing foreign petroleum products is a lot more profitable...
Are the reserves on government or private land? There are many independent oil companies (many in Canada) that would be willing to explore since oil is at all-time high.
Whether on government or private land, makes no difference. According to DR law, all subsurface mineral resources (including water) belong to the state. So if you dig a well for water on your own property, tecnically you have to pay INDRHI, CAASD or similar organization for the right to extract the water from your own property. Actually, its a curse to have a valuable mineral resource found on your land, the government will impound it, paying a pittance for the value of your land, and you're out. Since the last 40 years, government authorities have lined their own pockets by issuing concessions to US oil companies for the exploration of oil in DR soil. However, these concession contracts are used only by the US oil company concessionaires to overestimate their exploration and R&D expenses for tax purposes in the US, obviously a tax swindle.
The question for a long time now, has not been whether or not there is oil. The main issue is whether or not there is enough oil present, and of good enough quality to make it economically feasible. Just to find an answer to this question requieres an investment of approximately $100 Million USD.
this planet is full of oil, it is everywhere, thousands of years of oil. but, the stuff we burn in our cars and power plants today is "cheap oil"....... "cheap oil" is easy to get to, and in abundant supply.........the problem that the world is facing is not running out of oil, but of running out of "cheap oil". Canada has an enormous amount of "oil sands" that up until now were too expensive to mine. right now these "oil sands" are booming. if Dominican oil were "cheap", it would have been exploited years ago.................the oil business in the US started in Pennsylvania, believe it or not, and there is still oil in the ground there, it is not "cheap" though...............
amparacorp, you are so right. Over 3.3 trillion tonnes of oil shale in the U.S alone. The overwhelming majority in Government land; Give the Interiour Department a call and they let you exploit some of it, lol
It's all a question of economics, and you said it, "it's not cheap". I know about Canada's huge current investment to extract oil from their oil sands. My own brother Enriquillo is working for Canada's CNRL, Horizon Oil Sands Project, north of Fort McMurray, under a 250K/year contract, as a civil engineer, building the refinery. Concerning the oil deposits in the DR, they've been located, however, commercial viability is hard to estimate accurately without drilling, and initial drilling costs are estimated upwards of US$800 million. If I was the president, I would have put the money in this, instead of the DR metro.
I have a map from the oil field Maleno,.Some years ago I made a crude oil analysis on that crude which produce large amount of diesel and have a lot of sulfur and I even had the original sample, I studied the maleno field and is only a oil layer with water, there is products to separate them but there is not enough oil . The coast of Azua are the more likely to have a considerable amount of crude oil, sea drilling is far more expensive ...that why they have not found anything yet,
A few years ago, I asked engineers working for one of the oil exploration companies doing seismic analysis with the use of explosives placed in a grid-like array close to my compound in Azua. The told me that they were quite sure commercial oil deposits were located offshore, in the middle of Ocoa bay, and probably in pockets below 2000 meters from the surface. Considering that an offshore oil drilling platform can cost up to US$200 million, and deep-water platforms up to US$1 billion, any oil exploration/production project in the DR will require a political consensus not presently available or predictable.
Why is there no Ethanol production in this country? There is certainly ample supply of sugar cane. A plant would pay for itself in no time. We would not want to rock the tax revenue boat on overpriced Venezuelan oil now would we?
tambo'
tambo'
Actually, Venezuela sells oil to the DR at a discount, under an agreement called Petrocaribe. Venezuela finances 30% of the amount invoiced as a 20 year credit at 1 percent interest. Concerning ethanol, this alternate fuel source is currently being promoted without sufficient due diligence. The ethanol industry is marketed as environmentally friendly, which it is not. There is also the issue of agricultural land competition with food crops, which may tend to push food prices upwards.
Ethanol Myth?
A couple of articles I found:
Brazil's ethanol slaves: 200,000 migrant sugar cutters who prop up renewable energy boom
Tom Phillips in Palmares Paulista, Friday March 9, 2007, The Guardian
Behind rusty gates, the heart of Brazil's energy revolution can be found in the stale air of a squalid red-brick tenement building. Inside, dozens of road-weary migrant workers are crammed into minuscule cubicles, filled with rickety bunk-beds and unpacked bags, preparing for their first day at work in the sugar plantations of Sao Paulo.
This is Palmares Paulista, a rural town 230 miles from Sao Paulo and the centre of a South American renewable energy boom that is transforming Brazil into a global reference point on how to cut carbon emissions and oil imports at the same time.
Inside the prison-like construction are the cortadores de cana - sugar cane cutters - part of a destitute migrant workforce of about 200,000 men who help prop up Brazil's ethanol industry.
Biofuels are mega-business in Brazil. Such has been the success of the country's ethanol programme - launched during the 1970s military dictatorship - that it is now attracting attention from around the world. Yesterday President George Bush arrived in Sao Paulo to announce an "ethanol alliance" with his Brazilian counterpart, Luiz Inacio "Lula" da Silva. The bilateral agreement has been touted by the Brazilian media as the first step towards the creation of an "ethanol Opec".
Last year sugar and alcohol were Brazil's second biggest agricultural export products, worth an estimated $8bn (?4bn). Producers, meanwhile, expect the country's sugar cane production to jump by 55% in the coming six years, largely because of growing demand from the US and Europe. They hope that closer trade ties with the US in particular will help accelerate the ethanol industry's growth, providing jobs and funding the construction of dozens of new processing plants in the region.
But drive to the outskirts of Palmares Paulista and a much bleaker picture emerges of what President Lula has dubbed Brazil's "energy revolution". On one side, thick green plantations of sugar cane stretch out as far as the eye can see; on the other lopsided red-brick shacks crowd together, home to hundreds of impoverished workers who risk life and limb to provide the local factories with sugar cane.
Economic refugees fleeing the country's arid and impoverished north-east, these men earn as little as 400 reais (?100) a month to provide the raw material that is fuelling this energy revolution.
Palmares Paulista is both a burgeoning agricultural town and a social catastrophe. "They arrive here with nothing," said Valeria Gardiano, who heads the social service department in Palmares, a town of 9,000 whose population swells each year with the influx of between 4,000 and 5,000 migrant workers.
"They have the clothes on their bodies and nothing else. They bring their children with malnutrition, their ill mothers-in-law. We try to reduce the problem. But there is no way we can fix it 100%. It is total exploitation," she said.
Activists go even further. They say the "cortadores" are effectively slaves and complain that Brazil's ethanol industry is, in fact, a shadowy world of middle men and human rights abuses.
"They come here because they are forced from their homes by the lack of work," said Francisco Alves, a professor from nearby Sao Carlos University who has spent more than 20 years studying Sao Paulo's migrant workforce. "They will do anything to get by."
That includes working 12-hour shifts in scorching heat and earning just over 50p per tonne of sugar cane cut, before returning to squalid, overcrowded "guest houses" rented to them at extortionate prices by unscrupulous landlords, often ex-sugar cutters themselves.
Faced with exhausting work in temperatures of over 30C (86F), some will die. According to Sister Ines Facioli, from the Pastoral do Migrante, a Catholic support network based in nearby Guariba, 17 workers died between 2004 and 2006 as a result of overwork or exhaustion.
But the annual exodus from the northeast continues, and as foreign investment in the ethanol industry increases the numbers are expected to grow further.
Among the newest arrivals in Palmares are the Santos family, four brothers aged 19, 22, 24 and 26 who last week stepped off an illegally chartered bus after a 24-hour journey from the arid backlands of Bahia state. "We need the work," said Sidney Alves dos Santos, 24, sitting in the stuffy shack that will be his home until the harvest ends in December. "There's no other way."
In another tatty hovel Pedro Castro, a 26-year-old from Bahia, remembered last year's harvest. "It's like you are inside a bread oven," he said of the thick protective clothes needed in the plantations to protect workers from their sharp machetes. "But there's no work back home. What else are we supposed to do?"
At just after 5pm the square outside Palmares' church fills with the growl of bus engines. A fleet of a dozen battered Mercedes coaches rattle through the town centre, filled with exhausted workers returning from a day in the fields.
"It breaks your heart," said Cristina Vieira, a member of the local Catholic mission that offers support to the workers. "They think it rains money in Sao Paulo but they are chasing an illusion. When you talk to them a lot of them say: 'If I'd have known it would be like this I would never have come.' They have no rights and they can't complain to anyone - in a certain way they don't exist."
In numbers
?4bn Annual value of Brazil's sugar and alcohol exports
55% Anticipated increase in sugar cane production over the next six years
?100 Equivalent value of the average sugar cane cutter's monthly wage
A couple of articles I found:
Brazil's ethanol slaves: 200,000 migrant sugar cutters who prop up renewable energy boom
Tom Phillips in Palmares Paulista, Friday March 9, 2007, The Guardian
Behind rusty gates, the heart of Brazil's energy revolution can be found in the stale air of a squalid red-brick tenement building. Inside, dozens of road-weary migrant workers are crammed into minuscule cubicles, filled with rickety bunk-beds and unpacked bags, preparing for their first day at work in the sugar plantations of Sao Paulo.
This is Palmares Paulista, a rural town 230 miles from Sao Paulo and the centre of a South American renewable energy boom that is transforming Brazil into a global reference point on how to cut carbon emissions and oil imports at the same time.
Inside the prison-like construction are the cortadores de cana - sugar cane cutters - part of a destitute migrant workforce of about 200,000 men who help prop up Brazil's ethanol industry.
Biofuels are mega-business in Brazil. Such has been the success of the country's ethanol programme - launched during the 1970s military dictatorship - that it is now attracting attention from around the world. Yesterday President George Bush arrived in Sao Paulo to announce an "ethanol alliance" with his Brazilian counterpart, Luiz Inacio "Lula" da Silva. The bilateral agreement has been touted by the Brazilian media as the first step towards the creation of an "ethanol Opec".
Last year sugar and alcohol were Brazil's second biggest agricultural export products, worth an estimated $8bn (?4bn). Producers, meanwhile, expect the country's sugar cane production to jump by 55% in the coming six years, largely because of growing demand from the US and Europe. They hope that closer trade ties with the US in particular will help accelerate the ethanol industry's growth, providing jobs and funding the construction of dozens of new processing plants in the region.
But drive to the outskirts of Palmares Paulista and a much bleaker picture emerges of what President Lula has dubbed Brazil's "energy revolution". On one side, thick green plantations of sugar cane stretch out as far as the eye can see; on the other lopsided red-brick shacks crowd together, home to hundreds of impoverished workers who risk life and limb to provide the local factories with sugar cane.
Economic refugees fleeing the country's arid and impoverished north-east, these men earn as little as 400 reais (?100) a month to provide the raw material that is fuelling this energy revolution.
Palmares Paulista is both a burgeoning agricultural town and a social catastrophe. "They arrive here with nothing," said Valeria Gardiano, who heads the social service department in Palmares, a town of 9,000 whose population swells each year with the influx of between 4,000 and 5,000 migrant workers.
"They have the clothes on their bodies and nothing else. They bring their children with malnutrition, their ill mothers-in-law. We try to reduce the problem. But there is no way we can fix it 100%. It is total exploitation," she said.
Activists go even further. They say the "cortadores" are effectively slaves and complain that Brazil's ethanol industry is, in fact, a shadowy world of middle men and human rights abuses.
"They come here because they are forced from their homes by the lack of work," said Francisco Alves, a professor from nearby Sao Carlos University who has spent more than 20 years studying Sao Paulo's migrant workforce. "They will do anything to get by."
That includes working 12-hour shifts in scorching heat and earning just over 50p per tonne of sugar cane cut, before returning to squalid, overcrowded "guest houses" rented to them at extortionate prices by unscrupulous landlords, often ex-sugar cutters themselves.
Faced with exhausting work in temperatures of over 30C (86F), some will die. According to Sister Ines Facioli, from the Pastoral do Migrante, a Catholic support network based in nearby Guariba, 17 workers died between 2004 and 2006 as a result of overwork or exhaustion.
But the annual exodus from the northeast continues, and as foreign investment in the ethanol industry increases the numbers are expected to grow further.
Among the newest arrivals in Palmares are the Santos family, four brothers aged 19, 22, 24 and 26 who last week stepped off an illegally chartered bus after a 24-hour journey from the arid backlands of Bahia state. "We need the work," said Sidney Alves dos Santos, 24, sitting in the stuffy shack that will be his home until the harvest ends in December. "There's no other way."
In another tatty hovel Pedro Castro, a 26-year-old from Bahia, remembered last year's harvest. "It's like you are inside a bread oven," he said of the thick protective clothes needed in the plantations to protect workers from their sharp machetes. "But there's no work back home. What else are we supposed to do?"
At just after 5pm the square outside Palmares' church fills with the growl of bus engines. A fleet of a dozen battered Mercedes coaches rattle through the town centre, filled with exhausted workers returning from a day in the fields.
"It breaks your heart," said Cristina Vieira, a member of the local Catholic mission that offers support to the workers. "They think it rains money in Sao Paulo but they are chasing an illusion. When you talk to them a lot of them say: 'If I'd have known it would be like this I would never have come.' They have no rights and they can't complain to anyone - in a certain way they don't exist."
In numbers
?4bn Annual value of Brazil's sugar and alcohol exports
55% Anticipated increase in sugar cane production over the next six years
?100 Equivalent value of the average sugar cane cutter's monthly wage
Then this editorial:
There Is No Ethanol Revolution in Brazil
by Andr? Kenji de Sousa
Most ethanol apologists like to use the example of Brazil. Unfortunately, I live in Brazil and I see no ethanol revolution here. In fact, the heavily subsidized ethanol program (Pro-Alcool) used to be an ecological and social disaster. From 1975 to 1989, the Brazilian government spent nine billion dollars in subsidies for ethanol production (and that's not counting special loans, that were never paid, from state-owned banks): Nine billion dollars in a country like Brazil (where one can buy a can of soda for less than fifty cents of a dollar) is a pornographic amount of money.
Large areas of land were wasted for monoculture (some people complain one of the most fertile lands of the country, in the Ribeir?o Preto region, is being degraded by sugar cane monoculture), semi-slave (and child) labor were heavily used. Nasty environmental problems were only surpassed in the 1990's, like the pollution of rivers by vinhoto (produced in ethanol refining) and crop burning (until the mechanization of the crops, that technique were used to cut sugarcane). C'mon, greens and progressives: that's not such a good thing to defend.
I don't remember anyone that owned an ethanol-fueled car besides my father. And he used to complain a lot about it. He complained that he had difficulties to ignite the car in cold days (and a cold day in Brazil is warmer than a summer day in most cities of the United States). Only when there were created flexible-fuel vehicles (allowing people to run cars both on gasoline and ethanol) that the Brazilian consumer began to see ethanol as a compelling alternative. In 1997, only 1,117 cars running on ethanol were produced in the whole country, in 2000 almost zero! No one wants to rely only on ethanol.
The so-called "Brazilian energy independence" should be explained. Brazilian hydrography allows the construction of heavy dams, so the country doesn't have to burn coal or fuel to produce most of its electricity (but, some years ago, the country faced a heavy electricity shortage. And no one guarantees that we are free from that). Brazil has also good reserves of oil. The oil and gasoline production in the country is monopolized by Petrobras, the local version of Pemex and PDVSA, the state-owned company that is hated by Brazilian conservatives and free-market proponents. It's because of a federal law that Brazilian gasoline has 20 to 25% of ethanol. And gasoline in Brazil is very expensive (neighboring Argentina has a more affordable gasoline price some Brazilian car owners even drives twenty miles to fuel there!), especially considering that there are no heavy taxes to maintain highways (like most Europeans countries do). And natural gas also does a good job (especially because we don't need natural gas for home heating).
Even if ethanol were really successful in Brazil, that's not the best example. First, Brazilian consumption of energy is far smaller than in the US. Few Brazilians uses air conditioning (and most of them use that only in some rooms of their homes), even fewer use home heating (and that's among the middle and higher class). Some tourist guides even recommend Brazilians to take care to take blouses due to air conditioning in Florida. Brazilians also have a smaller dependence on cars: most poor people don't drive, and even rich people don't use it in the way that Americans are accustomed to (no one drives everyday fifty miles to work). Second, conditions are much more favorable for agriculture in Brazil than in the United States (as orange producers in Florida are tired to know). The minimum wage of Brazil is something like one hundred dollars (and most farmers do not pay that to their workers), there are not such cold winters like most of the US has, the soil is more fertile, there is more land available. And the American ethanol program is even worse than the Brazilian one, since corn ethanol is far more ineffective than the sugar cane one.
Earlier this year, Brazil faced a heavy problem: since there were rising sugar prices in the international market, most producers decided to produce sugar instead of ethanol. Without federal government intervention, we could have faced shortage of the product. Most of the ethanol apologists like Mark Steyn and Thomas Friedman like to point out the solution to simply import ethanol from Brazil, but if the Americans begin to do that, then ethanol would have unaffordable prices compared to gasoline. Or, sure, I would find no sugar to put in my coffee. Maybe that could be the perfect solution for all these people complaining about obesity, eh?
Some Brazilians tends to mix in national pride when they talk about ethanol. It's the same thing than trying to discuss the rationale of American military interventions with an American. It's easier to discuss soccer with Brazilians than to discuss ethanol. An interesting and cheap solution that I see in Brazil is natural gas, not ethanol, to fuel cars. But we don't have to spend natural gas in home heating.
Ethanol apologists shouldn't be talking about "Brazilian ethanol success" because there is no such success. And learn that these kinds of decisions should be made by the market, no by the government.
August 9, 2006
Andr? Kenji de Sousa writes from S?o Paulo, Brazil. Photographs, drawings and further information can be found at his website
There Is No Ethanol Revolution in Brazil
by Andr? Kenji de Sousa
Most ethanol apologists like to use the example of Brazil. Unfortunately, I live in Brazil and I see no ethanol revolution here. In fact, the heavily subsidized ethanol program (Pro-Alcool) used to be an ecological and social disaster. From 1975 to 1989, the Brazilian government spent nine billion dollars in subsidies for ethanol production (and that's not counting special loans, that were never paid, from state-owned banks): Nine billion dollars in a country like Brazil (where one can buy a can of soda for less than fifty cents of a dollar) is a pornographic amount of money.
Large areas of land were wasted for monoculture (some people complain one of the most fertile lands of the country, in the Ribeir?o Preto region, is being degraded by sugar cane monoculture), semi-slave (and child) labor were heavily used. Nasty environmental problems were only surpassed in the 1990's, like the pollution of rivers by vinhoto (produced in ethanol refining) and crop burning (until the mechanization of the crops, that technique were used to cut sugarcane). C'mon, greens and progressives: that's not such a good thing to defend.
I don't remember anyone that owned an ethanol-fueled car besides my father. And he used to complain a lot about it. He complained that he had difficulties to ignite the car in cold days (and a cold day in Brazil is warmer than a summer day in most cities of the United States). Only when there were created flexible-fuel vehicles (allowing people to run cars both on gasoline and ethanol) that the Brazilian consumer began to see ethanol as a compelling alternative. In 1997, only 1,117 cars running on ethanol were produced in the whole country, in 2000 almost zero! No one wants to rely only on ethanol.
The so-called "Brazilian energy independence" should be explained. Brazilian hydrography allows the construction of heavy dams, so the country doesn't have to burn coal or fuel to produce most of its electricity (but, some years ago, the country faced a heavy electricity shortage. And no one guarantees that we are free from that). Brazil has also good reserves of oil. The oil and gasoline production in the country is monopolized by Petrobras, the local version of Pemex and PDVSA, the state-owned company that is hated by Brazilian conservatives and free-market proponents. It's because of a federal law that Brazilian gasoline has 20 to 25% of ethanol. And gasoline in Brazil is very expensive (neighboring Argentina has a more affordable gasoline price some Brazilian car owners even drives twenty miles to fuel there!), especially considering that there are no heavy taxes to maintain highways (like most Europeans countries do). And natural gas also does a good job (especially because we don't need natural gas for home heating).
Even if ethanol were really successful in Brazil, that's not the best example. First, Brazilian consumption of energy is far smaller than in the US. Few Brazilians uses air conditioning (and most of them use that only in some rooms of their homes), even fewer use home heating (and that's among the middle and higher class). Some tourist guides even recommend Brazilians to take care to take blouses due to air conditioning in Florida. Brazilians also have a smaller dependence on cars: most poor people don't drive, and even rich people don't use it in the way that Americans are accustomed to (no one drives everyday fifty miles to work). Second, conditions are much more favorable for agriculture in Brazil than in the United States (as orange producers in Florida are tired to know). The minimum wage of Brazil is something like one hundred dollars (and most farmers do not pay that to their workers), there are not such cold winters like most of the US has, the soil is more fertile, there is more land available. And the American ethanol program is even worse than the Brazilian one, since corn ethanol is far more ineffective than the sugar cane one.
Earlier this year, Brazil faced a heavy problem: since there were rising sugar prices in the international market, most producers decided to produce sugar instead of ethanol. Without federal government intervention, we could have faced shortage of the product. Most of the ethanol apologists like Mark Steyn and Thomas Friedman like to point out the solution to simply import ethanol from Brazil, but if the Americans begin to do that, then ethanol would have unaffordable prices compared to gasoline. Or, sure, I would find no sugar to put in my coffee. Maybe that could be the perfect solution for all these people complaining about obesity, eh?
Some Brazilians tends to mix in national pride when they talk about ethanol. It's the same thing than trying to discuss the rationale of American military interventions with an American. It's easier to discuss soccer with Brazilians than to discuss ethanol. An interesting and cheap solution that I see in Brazil is natural gas, not ethanol, to fuel cars. But we don't have to spend natural gas in home heating.
Ethanol apologists shouldn't be talking about "Brazilian ethanol success" because there is no such success. And learn that these kinds of decisions should be made by the market, no by the government.
August 9, 2006
Andr? Kenji de Sousa writes from S?o Paulo, Brazil. Photographs, drawings and further information can be found at his website
As a sidenote, there are also confirmed sizable deposits of natural gas somewhere in the northeast region (east of Samana, but I do not recall the exact town). A Spanish firm conducted the study, which included an estimate of the volume, but again, the problem is the financial commitment that must be made to access the fuel.
The details escape me right now, but this was publicized within the past 3 to 5 years.
The details escape me right now, but this was publicized within the past 3 to 5 years.
This is not new CB. The sugar industry was the primary reason for salvery. Workers in the sugar industry, whether in the DR, Brazil, Guyana, .... et al are subjected to the absolute worst working conditions. It's back breaking work from early till late for pittance and they're treated like animals. Workers are bussed to different sugar plantations and they're paid by weight, so they're forced to work like donkeys.
No argument from me. I'm just pointing out that ethanol isn't the answer. And the Brazilian model, the one environmentalists point to, is a myth.
Cuban oil has a high percentage of sulfur and is not well suited to petrol production. As the DR is on the same line, it wouldn't surprise me that the DR oil reserves have a similar structure. Thusly they would be good to produce heavy oil and oil for heating, but not good for petrol use.