About 90 percent of the oil wells in Sudan’s East Darfur State have been completely sabotaged and vandalized as copper and electrical wires were stolen by unknown persons before some of the wells were set ablaze.
23 out of 36 wells were operating in the state’s oil fields since 2016 run by the Chinese Petro-Engine and Sharf companies.
The director of the Jad Al-Sayed Administrative Unit in Abu Karinka Locality, Hussein Ahmed Hussein, told Radio Tamazuj that the damage to the oil wells in the Shaq Omar area was a great blow.
“The devastation that occurred is considered great as 90 percent of the oil wells were destroyed, and what happened is a detriment to Sudan,” he explained.
Ahmed called for efforts to stop the deliberate destruction of a public resource to preserve what remains of the wells and to ward off environmental hazards such as oil leakage from pipelines.
For his part, an oil expert, Engineer Taha Al-Khidr, believes that the method they use to extract oil from pipelines is thievery, as it relies on the method of pumping crude oil using electricity.
“This method is flawed and prohibited in all countries of the world because it quickly depletes the oil and deprives future generations of benefiting from the resource,” he stated.
The engineer attributed the disruption to the people’s feeling of injustice from companies that did not provide them with any service through social responsibility and deprived their local youth of employment while bringing employees from the regions of northern Sudan in to do jobs such as cleaning, prayer muezzin, and guarding. He
“These are ordinary jobs that do not require scientific qualifications,” he added.