The human rights and development tragedies behind the UK’s Amazon gas imports
LNG entering the UK from Peru comes from highly controversial project in the remote rainforest
Late last year the UK’s Department for Energy Security & Net Zero published a report on “Energy Trends” which included, among other things, the top four sources of UK gas imports in 2023. The first three came as no particular surprise: Norway, the US and Qatar. The fourth perhaps more so: Peru.
Indeed, unlikely as this may sound, the UK was the number one destination for Peruvian gas exports in 2023. According to my extrapolation of data from the regulatory agency OSINERGMIN, this was by a huge margin: more than twice as much Peruvian gas was imported into the UK as the second biggest destination, South Korea, and more than four times as much as the third biggest, Spain. In 2022, it was similar: the UK was again the number one destination by a long, long way, beating out 2nd-placed South Korea by more than two times and 3rd-placed Japan by almost 10 times.
But where in Peru does this gas ostensibly come from? Not its coastal region like so much of its oil, nor the Andes like so many of its minerals, but a 58,000 hectare concession, Lot 56, overlapping numerous indigenous Matsigenka communities in one of the remotest parts of the Amazon basin - what International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN) scientists years ago called “the last place on earth” to drill for fossil fuels. From there, it is transported for more than 600 kilometres over the Andes before being converted into liquified natural gas (LNG) on the Pacific coast - at the first LNG plant built in South America - and shipped abroad.
Immediately adjacent to Lot 56 is another, slightly older, much bigger concession, Lot 88, where the gas, from the San Martín and Cashiriari fields just to the north and south of the River Camisea, is supposed to be for Peru’s domestic market only. What you will rarely read in much of what is written about that concession, established in 2000, is that it includes a massive chunk of the Kugapakori-Nahua-Nanti and Others Reserve, originally dating from 1990, which was intended to protect the rights, land and lives of highly vulnerable indigenous people living in what Peruvian law now calls “isolation” and/or “initial contact.” As indigenous federations and many others, including Peru’s Health Ministry, have highlighted over the years, permitting companies to operate in that supposedly intangible reserve has had devastating impacts on many of the indigenous people living there.
Perhaps someone importing Peruvian LNG might try to distance themselves from what has been going on in Lot 88 by claiming, “Our gas is from Lot 56! They’re two different operations!”, but that would be entirely disingenuous. That’s not just because the two concessions are contiguous, or part of the same multi-trillion cubic feet gas belt. It is because they are run by the very same consortium of international companies - including most importantly Pluspetrol, Hunt Oil and Repsol - and because the gas is sent to the same processing facility along the banks of the River Urubamba where it is all mixed together.
“Whatever comes in [to Las Malvinas, the processing facility] on the receiving end from Blocks 88 and 56 must be co-mingled prior to dispatch,” Bill Powers, from the US-based NGO E-Tech International, tells me. “Everything leaving Malvinas is the collective product of 56 and 88.”
In addition, the gas is all transported from Las Malvinas for the first 210 kilometres by the same pipeline - again run by some of the same companies, most importantly Hunt - while the Pacific coast LNG plant is or has also been run by some of the same companies too, including Hunt again, currently together with Shell and two other firms. Indeed, it was Shell which discovered Camisea’s gas back in the 1980s, and it is Shell too now which, since 2014 when it acquired some of Repsol’s assets, has been the “offtaker” managing the LNG exports.
No surprises, then, that operations in Lot 88 and Lot 56, sometimes together with the trans-Andean pipelines and LNG plant, have come to be known jointly as the “Camisea project” or “Camisea gas project”, or that Lot 56, the LNG plant and/or the extra 408km of pipeline running to it have been dubbed “Camisea II” by some. As the now-defunct Independent Advisory Panel on Development Issues in South-Central Peru put it some years ago in a report that hailed Camisea’s “very positive macroeconomic benefits” but was utterly damning about its failure to bring development to local indigenous communities, including water and sanitation projects, healthcare and education, it is impossible to “objectively separate the Peru LNG Project from the larger context in which it operates.”
“Peru LNG is part of a much larger series of hydrocarbon-based projects centered on blocks 56 and 88 in Peru, known broadly as Camisea,” stated the Panel’s report. “Because these projects are so closely interlinked and interdependent, it is difficult to separate the wider social and environmental impacts of one from the others. Combined, these projects directly impact areas within the Departments of Cuzco, Ayacucho, Huancavelica, Ica, and Lima.”
Why draw attention to this now? Partly because over the last couple of years Peru has been on an apparently renewed drive to open up as much of its Amazon rainforest as possible to oil and gas, and because in response the outcry from many Peruvians has been to highlight the development disaster - no other word for it - that has been unfolding in the Camisea region. For example, in December 2023, when more than 40 civil society organisations issued a statement rejecting proposals to allow oil and gas firms into national parks, other “protected natural areas” and reserves for indigenous people in “isolation”, one of their reasons was that the development being touted by some of those promoting such proposals would never actually arrive, as borne out by the Camisea experience.
“After 20 years of exploiting Lot 88, Camisea remains a failed promise for the Cusco region, given that the gas that has been extracted has not even reached the local population, much less indigenous people,” that statement read. “The exploitation of Camisea gas has not brought the forecast development to the province of La Convención, where 25.4% of the population live in poverty (2018), 19.1% of children under five suffer from chronic malnutrition (2020) and 33.4% of children between six and 35 months are anaemic (2020).”
That statement also noted that one La Convención district has the “largest budget in the country” because of Camisea, but the highest rates of “maternal deaths, anaemia and child malnutrition, with more than 70% of the population malnourished.” It is “incredible that, 20 years after Camisea, the intention is now to exploit new gas reserves without yet having fulfilled the promises made to the poorest and most disadvantaged people in Peru,” wrote Sofía Rodríguez, from NGO Derecho, Ambiente y Recursos Naturales (DAR), in an article last September.
In addition, those speaking out against this new Amazon oil and gas drive have also highlighted how another of the supposed justifications - that it will boost Peru’s energy security - is contradicted by the fact that so much Camisea gas, ostensibly through Lot 56 and the LNG project, has been going abroad. This question of how much, if any, Camisea gas should be exported remains one of the most politically contentious issues in Peru.
“New promises of lots of cheap gas for local families, like in Camisea, contrast with the absence of measures in the current exploitation contracts prioritising domestic consumption, where 50% of the gas produced in the country is exported,” read a statement published in the La República newspaper last August and signed by 40 organisations and 38 individuals. “This illustrates the incoherence of the discourse about concern for Peru’s energy security.”
Last March, in a speech in the UK’s House of Lords arguing against the UK importing LNG, Conservative peer Lord Ashcombe highlighted the increased carbon footprint of doing so, noting “we bring it too from Peru via the Panama Canal.” Ultimately, 2024 saw much less Peruvian LNG entering the UK, but no doubt Ashcombe could have made a far more powerful argument for dropping it altogether. Not only is all this slowing or impeding the urgently-needed transition to renewables, but Camisea gas should arguably be for Peruvians and no one else. Moreover, the Camisea project has abjectly failed to bring genuine development to local communities, and it involves a purportedly off-limits reserve in one of the most fragile ecosystems on Earth where, as has been documented many times, indigenous peoples’ lives have been devastated.