Whistleblower reveals “bad” pollution from Colombian oil giants

BBC World Service found that Columbia’s energy giant Ecopetrol has polluted hundreds of locations with oil and biodiversity wetlands.

Data leaked by a former employee showed more than 800 records of those sites from 1989 to 2018, and indicated that the company failed to report one fifth of them.

The BBC also got the numbers showing that the company has overflowed hundreds of times since then.

Ecopetrol said it is fully compliant with Colombian law and has industry-leading practices regarding sustainability.

The company’s main refinery is located in Barrancabermeja, 260 kilometers (162 miles) north of Bogota, the capital of Colombia.

Numerous processing plants, industrial chimneys and storage tanks extend along the banks of Magdalena, Colombia’s longest river, to nearly 2 km (1.2 miles), a source of water for millions of people.

Members of the fishing community there believe that oil pollution is affecting wildlife in the river.

The wider area is home to endangered river turtles, manatees and spider monkeys, and is part of a species-rich hotspot in one of the world’s most biodiversity countries. Nearby wetlands include protected habitats for jaguars.

When the BBC visited last June, families fished together on waterways with crisscrossing oil pipelines.

One local said some of the fish they caught released a taste of cooked crude oil.

In some places, films with iridescent swirls can be seen on the water – a unique signature of oil pollution.

A fisherman jumped out of the water and formed a vegetation in deep mud.

“This is grease and waste directly from the Ecopetrol refinery,” said Yuly Velásquez, president of the Federation of Federations of Federations of Federations of Federations of Federations of Federations of Federations of Federations of Federations of Federations of Federations of Federations of Federations of Federations of Federations of Federations of Federations of Federations of Federations of Federations of Federations of Federations of Federations of Federations of Federations of Federations of Federations of Federations of Federations of Federations of Federation

Ecopetrol, owned by Columbia and listed on the New York Stock Exchange, rejected the claims of fishermen that it polluted the water.

To answer the BBC question, it said it has an effective wastewater treatment system and an effective oil spill event plan.

Andrés Olarte, the whistleblower who shared the company’s data, said the company’s pollution dates back many years.

He joined Ecopetrol in 2017 and began serving as an advisor to CEO. He said he soon realized that there was a “problem”.

Olarte said he challenged the manager what he described as “terrible” pollution data, but was rejected by such things as: “Why do you ask these questions? You didn’t get the content of this work, and they were rejected.”

He left the company in 2019 and shared a large amount of company data with the U.S. non-governmental organization Environmental Survey (EIA) and later with the BBC. The BBC has verified that it comes from Ecopetrol’s servers.

A database he shared, dated January 2019, contains 839 so-called “unresolved environmental impacts” lists in Colombia.

Ecopetrol uses the term to mean areas where oil is not completely cleaned from soil and water. Data shows that as of 2019, some of these sites have been contaminated in this way for more than a decade.

Olarte claims the company is trying to hide some of them, noting that about one-fifth of the records are marked “only Ecopetrol is known.”

“You can see a category in Excel that lists which is hidden from authority and which is what, which shows the process of hiding things from the government,” Olarte said.

The BBC filmed on one of the websites marked “Only known to Ecopetrol”, which was dated in the database in 2017. Seven years later, thick black, oily substances were seen along part of the edge of the wetland, surrounded by plastic enclosed barriers.

Felipe Bayón From 2017 to 2023, Ecopetrol’s CEO told the BBC that he strongly denied any policy of retaining information about pollution.

“I said to you with complete confidence, no, no policy, no instructions to say, ‘These things cannot be shared’.”

Mr. Bayón blamed Sabotage for many oil spills.

Colombia has a long history of armed conflict, with illegal armed groups targeting oil facilities, but only mentioning “theft” or “attack” in 6% of cases listed in the database.

He also said he believed that since then, “significant advances” in the problem that led to oil pollution have been resolved.

However, a set of data shows that ecological phenols continue to contaminate.

Figures obtained by the BBC from the National Environmental License Administration (ANLA), the environmental regulator in Columbia, show that Ecopetrol has reported hundreds of oil portions each year since 2020.

When asked about the 2019 Polluted Locations Database, Ecopetrol admitted that it had a record of 839 environmental incidents, but the controversy was all listed as “unresolved.”

Since 2018, 95% of contaminated sites have been classified as unresolved sites, the company said.

It said all pollution incidents are subject to the management process and are reported to regulators.

Data from the regulator includes hundreds of spills in the Barrancabermeja area where Ms. Velásquez and fishermen live.

The fisherman and her colleagues have been monitoring the biodiversity in the region’s wetlands that enter the Magdalena River.

She said there had been “slaughter” of animal islands. She said: “This year, there were three dead manatees and five dead.

It is not clear what causes the death – El Niño weather phenomena and climate change may be factors.

A 2022 study by the University of Nottingham University lists pollution (from oil production as well as other industrial and domestic sources) as one of several factors that reduce the Magdalena River Basin, including climate change.

Mr. Olarte left Ecopetrol in 2019. He moved to his family residence near Barrancabermeja and said he met with an old contact to ask questions about the job opening. Shortly thereafter, he said an anonymous caller called him threatened to kill him.

“On the phone, I knew they thought I had a complaint against Ecopetrol, and that was not the case,” he said.

Mr Orat said more threats followed, including notes he showed to the BBC. He had no idea who posed a threat, nor did he have any evidence that Ecopetrol ordered them.

Ms Velásquez and seven others also told the BBC they had encountered a death threat after challenging Ecopetrol.

She said an armed group fired a warning gun at her house and sprayed the word “outd” on the wall.

The fisherman is now protected by armed bodyguards paid by the government, but the threat continues.

When asked about the threat described by Olarte, former CEO Bayón said they were “absolutely unacceptable”.

“I want to be totally clear… there is never such a sequence at any time,” Beyon said.

Ms. Velásquez and Mr. Olarte both knew that the risks were real. According to the NGO Global Witness, Colombia is the world’s most dangerous environmental defender country, killing 79 people in 2023.

Experts say the killing is linked to decades-long armed conflict in Colombia, where government forces and paramilitary personnel allied themselves to left-wing rebel groups.

Armed groups and drug cartels are still active in parts of the country despite the government’s attempt to end the conflict.

Matthew Smith, a Columbia-based oil analyst and financial journalist, said he did not believe the Ecopetrol manager was involved in the threat of armed groups.

But he said there was a “huge” overlap between former paramilitary groups and private security services.

He said private security companies often hire former members of paramilitary groups and compete for profitable contracts to protect oil facilities.

Mr Olarte has shared an internal Ecopetrol email showing that the company paid $65 million to more than 2,800 private security companies in 2018.

“There is always a risk for private security companies, the type of people they use and their desire to keep the contract going,” Smith said.

This may even include the kidnapping or murder of community leaders or environmental defenders, he said, to “make sure Ecopetrol’s actions go smoothly.”

Mr. Bellon said he was “convinced that the company’s relationship with private security companies had been inspected and due diligence.

Ecopetrol said it has never been associated with illegal armed groups. It says it has a strong due diligence process and has conducted a human rights impact assessment of its activities.

The BBC has contacted other members of the former Ecopetrol leader since Olarte’s employment, who strongly denied the allegations in this report.

Now living in Germany, Mr. Orat has been filing complaints to the Colombian authorities and the company itself about the environmental records of Ecopetrol – so far, no meaningful results.

He has also been involved in a series of legal cases against Ecopetrol and its administration, related to his work there, which have not been resolved.

“I do this to defend my own house, my area, the land of the people,” he said.

Mr. Perron emphasized the importance of the economic and social importance of Ecological Gallo to Colombia.

“We have 1.5 million households that don’t have access to energy or cook with firewood and coal,” he said. “I think we have to continue to rely on clean oil, gas, all the production of energy without ending industries that are so important to Colombians.”

Despite the threat, Ms. Velásquez is determined to continue to speak out.

“If we don’t go fishing, we won’t eat it,” she said. “If we speak and report, we will be killed…If we don’t report, we will commit suicide because all these severe pollution incidents are destroying the environment around us.”