Romania Update: Protests Continue as Chevron Restarts Fracking Exploration

pungesti-tvr-1 9th Decem­ber  Protests against Chevron’s activ­i­ty in Silis­tea – Pungesti, north­east­ern Roman­ian, area esca­lat­ed on Sat­ur­day, Decem­ber 6, trig­ger­ing the Amer­i­can oil and

pungesti-tvr-1 9th Decem­ber  Protests against Chevron’s activ­i­ty in Silis­tea – Pungesti, north­east­ern Roman­ian, area esca­lat­ed on Sat­ur­day, Decem­ber 6, trig­ger­ing the Amer­i­can oil and gas com­pa­ny to sus­pend its activ­i­ty on site.

Pro­test­ers destroyed the fence Chevron had built around the 20,000 – sqm land plot at the vil­lage out­skirts. One day lat­er, how­ev­er, Chevron re-start­ed their activ­i­ty on site.

Protests were staged down­town in cap­i­tal city Bucharest as well, with a peak reg­is­tered on Sun­day evening (Decem­ber 7), when three pro­test­ers were tak­en into cus­tody by the gen­darmes.

Silis­tea – Pungesti has now been declared a spe­cial area for pub­lic secu­ri­ty, with author­i­ties imple­ment­ing spe­cial mea­sures against vio­lence includ­ing plac­ing gen­darmes all around the vil­lage, accord­ing to Roman­ian media, which has been fol­low­ing the top­ic all through­out last week­end.

The gen­darmes have been check­ing the doc­u­ments of every­one vis­it­ing the vil­lage while vil­lagers have com­plained of the intru­sion, say­ing gen­darmes were in front of every house ask­ing peo­ple of their where­abouts.

The group of pro­test­ers in Pungesti, some 400 peo­ple, were a mix of locals and ecol­o­gy activists from Iaşi, Bucureşti, Braşov and Sibiu. They ini­tial­ly protest­ed peace­ful­ly, but the protest became vio­lent as some of them began throw­ing stones into Chevron’s vehi­cles, and tear­ing down the fence sur­round­ing the explo­ration site. Footage from the Pungesti protests, here.

Mean­while, Chevron has again stat­ed that all explo­ration activ­i­ties will use con­ven­tion­al tech­nolo­gies based on the per­mits it received in the begin­ning of Octo­ber. “We respect people’s right to express their opin­ion, but we believe this should be done with­in the lim­its of the law,” Chevron wrote in an offi­cial state­ment. The com­pa­ny had start­ed its activ­i­ty on site in Silis­tea – Pungesti on Decem­ber 2, after a first delay ear­li­er in Octo­ber, also because of local protests.

The protests against explo­ration for shale case was trig­gered by con­cerns that explo­ration would be harm­ful to the envi­ron­ment, and coin­cid­ed with protests against gold min­ing in Cen­tral Roma­nia, at Rosia Mon­tana, where the planned used of cyanide also caused con­cern.