DRC auctions off 27 oil blocks and 3 gas blocks
The Congolese authorities announced on Monday that they had decided to auction twenty-seven oil blocks and three gas blocks in the Democratic Republic of Congo , ignoring criticism from Greenpeace, we learned from an official source.
Out of 32 blocks initially selected, calls for tenders for the allocation of rights will be launched on July 28 for 27 oil blocks, in particular the two blocks returned by Israeli businessman Dan Gertler and 3 gas blocks. declared Didier Budimbu, Congolese Minister of Hydrocarbons.
The blocks concerned are distributed as follows over several corners of the country: three in the coastal basin, nine in the central Cuvette, eleven in the Tanganyika Graben and four in the Albertine Graben, he explained. The three gas blocks are located in Lake Kivu.
In February, the Congolese state reached an amicable agreement with the sulphurous businessman Dan Gertler who held rights to blocks 1 and 2 in the Albertine Graben for a value of two billion dollars.
In April, the Congolese government lifted the option of auctioning oil blocks, including at least nine located in the sensitive Central Cuvette ecosystem.
For the environmental protection organization Greenpeace, oil blocks should not be attributed in the Central Cuvette, a complex rich in peatlands, in biodiversity which contains approximately 30 gigatonnes of carbon, the equivalent of three years of global CO2 emissions.
For the NGO, this government project would have catastrophic consequences on the communities bordering these oil blocks, biodiversity and the global climate.
This is rejected by the Congolese Minister of the Environment Ève Bazaïba, who affirmed on Congolese public television that appropriate studies were being carried out allowing these attributions of exploration rights in the central Cuvette.
