Geothermal drilling threatens Chile's Atacama desert

By Christina Horsten May 25, 2010, 15:11 GMT

San Pedro de Atacama, Chile - El Tatio volcano in northern Chile is a tourist magnet, standing 4,300 metres high in the Andes, on the edge of one of the world's driest region, the Atacama desert.

At its feet spreads the largest geyser field in the southern hemisphere: more than 80 geysers spring up with regular rhythm in a barren mountain landscape, to spit their water, 90 degrees Celsius, into the air.

Such massive energy in one spot naturally attracts tourists - and also experts who want to try their luck in search of new geothermic sources of power.

Since mid-2008, the Chilean-Italian firm Empresa Geotermica del Norte (EGM) is seeking to draw geothermic energy at the foot of El Tatio. Largely unnoticed at first, an uncontrolled gas column shot 60 metres into the air for months until the leak was repaired by a municipal firm.

Nobody was injured, a blessing, since the geyser field so beloved by tourists was less than two kilometres away.

Locals feared for their safety, and for their natural environment.

'We want to ensure that they never again drill here,' says archaeologist Ana Maria Baron.

Baron chairs the citizen initiative Unidos por El Tatio (United for El Tatio), founded to protect the geyser field. It has about 70 members.

Eduardo Rodriguez, the regional delegate of the Chilean environmental organization CONAF, supports their activity.

'The drilling has very definite and visible negative effects on nature. Particularly the bush around the geysers and the rare and sensitive vicunas, local camelids, are sensitive and disturbed by it,' Rodriguez noted.

The area is not yet officially protected, local environment official Ana Lya Uriarte said.

'We have to convince ourselves that it was us who allowed such drilling in areas which do actually have the highest importance for our environment. Something really has to change there,' she said.

But not everyone is receptive to the demands of anti-drilling activists, because Chile stands before a dilemma: progress in the economically-oriented field of energy, or the greatest possible level of protection for the environment?

On the one hand, the vast, virgin nature of the desert is a trademark for the country and attracts thousands of tourists every year. On the other hand, it offers enough geothermal energy to give it more independence from natural gas imports from neighbouring Argentina.

The influential daily El Mercurio suggested the matter needed a cooler head.

'The leak did not actually cause any permanent damage. All human activity is risky, but without it there will also be no progress,' the newspaper wrote.

'The lesson must be to acknowledge mistakes, to implement more strict safety standards, and to look for new sources of energy using the best methods available in the world. The alternative is to react emotionally and to give up on geothermal energy in the country altogether. The latter would be the worst option.'