Portugal’s Secretary of State for Tourism, Ana Mendes Godinho, has stated that the Government will ensure that any exploratory drilling and oil extraction along the country’s coast will be done carefully.
"Nothing will be done that threatens tourism, this has been the concern of the government ... in fact, the situation has been completely monitored by the government, nothing will be done in opposition to the population, hence the concern is that nothing will be done to undermine our wealth," said Godinho at Tuesday’s Portuguese Tourism Summit in Lisbon.
As part of the panel participating in the summit, the secretary of state showed a video from Turismo de Portugal showing images of the country recorded by the public on mobile phone cameras.
Having praised the beauty of the images, especially the beaches, the panel moderator asked the secretary of state whether in the coming years those images would show oil platforms in the background.
With laughter in the room, Godinho said the Government is overseeing the oil exploration process "with care," thus ensuring she was in accord with the government’s stated policy of allowing the oil companies to find out if there is oil and gas onshore and offshore along the licensed coastal areas.
These oil concession licenses are for exploration and all other stages including extraction with few seriously believing that environmental assessments paid for by the oil companies will show anything but positive results. These reports will enable the oil companies seamlessly to progress from exploration to extraction despite howls of protest from the Algarve and other affected regions.
The flaw in the government’s argument is that if the oil companies thought that there was any serious doubt at all that they would be prevented from extracting oil and gas, based on an environmental survey that they themselves commission and pay for, the companies would not be spending tens of millions on exploratory surveys.
The thought of the government overseeing oil companies to ensure they are ‘taking care’ is as risible as it is untruthful with the fuels regulator ENCM now acting as a pro-oil adjunct to the powerful oil lobby and with the memory that the Deepwater Horizon disaster occurred during the exploratory phase of BPs Gulf of Mexico operations.
The Algarve's anti-oil pressure groups and its mayors claim rightly that accidents do and will happen and the risk, especially to the Algarve, to the booming tourism industry is not worth taking.
Ana Mendes Godinho has stated what will happen and that the oil concession contract will be allowed to run their course.
This remarkable foresight means she already appears to know the outcome of the legal action mounted by the Algarve’s mayors group AMAL, another example perhaps of political pressure being exerted on the judicial system that many foolishly had assumed was independent.
