Source: Electric.co.uk
It now seems that there is a new plan for a pipe that will deliver cheaper and cleaner energy to Manaus. However, environmentalists are upset over the idea that the pipe will run through the Amazon rainforest. If the plan gets the go ahead, the pipe will cut through some 660km of the Amazon rainforest. However, it will deliver cheaper, cleaner energy to a sprawling industrial city buried in the heart of the jungle.
Some environmentalists fear that the pipe is simply a bridgehead towards greater exploitation of the rich gas and oil fields that are lying beneath some of the most remote and undisturbed rainforest on Earth. Thanks to government tax breaks, the 2 million strong city of Manaus is a manufacturing powerhouse that is in the middle of the forest. It apparently plays host to companies such as Honda, Samsung and LG. A doubling of the city’s population in the last decade has seen the demand for power jump very high. Right now electricity is made by burning expensive diesel fuel.
The pipeline is suppose to start at a “well” site in an isolated region of the forest by the Urucu river. This is located just to the west of the Manaus. It has been buried a meter underground and will bring some of Petrobras’s 791 million barrels of proven Amazonian oil and gas reserves to the city.
The very first phase of the Urucu development attracted a lot of criticism. The original 1988 oil pipeline, which is running 380km north to a river terminal at Coari, is blamed for rises in violence, drug dealing and causing a lot of child prostitution in the town.