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Curacao rules against PDVSA refinery emissions
WILLEMSTAD (Reuters) - A refinery on Curacao operated by Venezuela's state oil company is damaging people's health and must cut emissions or face multi-million dollar fines, a court on the Caribbean island ruled on Thursday.
Judge Erik van Unen ruled in favor of 26 people and two bodies that brought a civil case against the 320,000 barrel per day Isla refinery claiming excessive emissions of sulfur dioxide and particulates in the air had caused serious health problems.
From 2010, exceeding a maximum yearly average sulfur dioxide emission will cost the Venezuelan company, PDVSA, about $3 million. The refinery is permitted to exceed a particulate limit 18 times a year. Further violations will cost Isla $300,000 per day.
PDVSA said Isla, which it leases from Curacao and is trying to buy, was not the only polluter on the island of 130,000 people located 40 miles off the Venezuelan coast.
The company has not yet commented on the ruling but is expected to appeal. In the past PDVSA has said it would cost $1.5 billion to meet stricter emissions standards at the refinery. But Van Unen said in his ruling the company would need to invest just $100 million to comply.
In 2007, a Curacao court threatened to close Isla if it cannot meet emissions standards, citing a study estimating that 18 people die prematurely every year from contaminant exposure.
Van Unen also took into account excessive flaring that sometimes runs for days and weeks. The amounts to be paid were decided with the serious health consequences and the earnings of PDVSA in mind, the judge stated.
PDVSA is under pressure to keep Isla running as it struggles with repeated outages at its own refineries in Venezuela. Gasoline from Isla is exported mainly to other Caribbean nations and South America.
Critics also say PDVSA, which has been in talks to buy the refinery for two years, provides few benefits to the island.
Curacao took in less than 1 percent of Isla's 2007 sales of $5 billion, receiving a rent payment of less than $20 million and almost no taxes.
Curacao became an affluent trading port in the Atlantic slave trade in the 17th and 18th centuries. Now it is a territory of the Netherlands and draws tourists with its beaches, scuba diving and the Dutch colonial architecture of the capital, Willemstad.
(Writing by Frank Jack Daniel; Editing by Clarence Fernandez)
