The president of YPF, Pablo González, assured that “the key is rational exploitation, balanced and respecting environmental standards, but seeking energy for the development of the country“, referring to the offshore exploration in the Argentine Sea.
“Oil and gas are a national strategic good, and gas is the energy of the transition, and we are going to finance the energy transition by rationally exploiting the resources,” González said in a dialogue with AM750 radio.
manager was surprised by the “resistance to carry out exploration tests, not drilling” and remembered that “YPF has had exploration platforms in the Strait of Magellan for 50 years.”
“Offshore has been developed in Argentina for a long time. All this is not new and it is not the first time that what happens is that as it is developed in the south of the country and many had not been notified,” he expanded.
For Gonzalez, “We always seek to mitigate and minimize the danger of contamination produced by any activity carried out by man.”
“In this case, public hearings have been held and 14 State bodies have intervened that have approved this exploration and it has been stopped with a judicial ruling that has been issued in a separate hearing; that is, the judge receives a piece of paper and the next day this gives rise to a precautionary measure,” he stressed.
For this reason, he considered thatThere is a lack of deep debate on this issue, especially when offshore exploration already exists, when it already exists in Argentina”.
In addition, he recalled, “in Argentina we have not had spills like those that made the news about ten days ago on the coast of Peru.
Most of the spills in the world are due to poor operations of the ships that transport crude oil, not because of the platforms. There is no history of such things happening.”
“What is being sought with the exploration is to be certain about what some preliminary studies say that indicate that there are hydrocarbons in that area,” he added.
Judgment in favor of the National Government
Last week, the federal judge from Mar del Plata, Santiago Martín, had suspended the progress of the seismic prospecting 300 kilometers from the coast of Mar del Plata at the request of the resources presented by the mayor of General Pueyrredón, Guillermo Montenegro; the Greenpeace Foundation and the Organization of Self-Convoked Environmentalists.
Yesterday, his pair Alfredo López authorized the offshore hydrocarbon exploration operations by accepting the appeal of the National Government to the precautionary measure.
