Podcast: Jungle Fumble - The Ecuador Lawsuit Against Texaco/Chevron

Environmental consultant Dave Russell recounts his involvement in the Ecuador lawsuit against Texaco/Chevron over Amazon rainforest contamination. Hired in 2003 to assess cleanup costs, Russell produced a $6.1 billion estimate based on unverified assumptions—a "SWAG" (Scientific Wild Ass Guess) that helped secure a $9.5 billion judgment. However, his soil samples revealed the primary toxins were missing, and ongoing contamination came from Petro Ecuador, not Chevron. The case unraveled when Chevron exposed massive fraud.

Transcript

Traci: Welcome to Chemical Processing's Distilled Podcast. This podcast and its transcript can be found at chemicalprocessing.com. You can also download this podcast on your favorite player. I'm Traci Purdum, editor-in-chief of CP. Joining me on today's episode is Dave Russell, president of Global Environmental Operations. Dave has also written for Chemical Processing on several occasions, with his most recent column, "EPA and OSHA Risk Assessments Favor Certain Industries," published in August 2025. Welcome, Dave. How are you?

Dave: Thank you. I'm very well, and I assume you are too.

Traci: Yeah, absolutely. Looking forward to today's conversation. I'm doing exceptionally well today, and I wanted to kick it off by learning a little bit more about you. Can you tell me about your background?

Dave: Well, I started in this business back in 1966 when I got my first degree. Surprisingly enough, it was in civil engineering, but then I found a home in chemical engineering and got a master's in '67. I worked for a couple of consulting firms and then went into the chemical industry for about nine or ten years, culminating with some time up in Niagara Falls working for Hooker Chemical, where I got my nose rubbed into a lot of the situations involved with the Love Canal and various other sites that they had going. From there, I came down to Atlanta in about '84, and I was out in my own consulting practice by '85, '86—I guess '87. And from there, it's been an interesting ride.

Traci: So you know a thing or two, is what you're saying.

Dave: Maybe. I keep on learning.

Clash of the Titans and Wild Guesses

Traci: I was reading up on you and SWAG. You want to tell the folks what SWAG is?

Dave: I had the distinct privilege—and it was a privilege—of introducing the term SWAG into the Southern District of New York Federal Court. The term actually stands for Scientific Wild Ass Guess. It was based on an estimate where I was asked to cobble together some numbers and just did my best, but I recognized the limits. Other people wanted to take those as gospel, and Judge Kaplan at the time—this was part of the later trial—said there's a lot of that going on around here. So anyhow, that's the history behind the SWAG.

Traci: All right. We're going to get into the SWAG here a little bit. You wrote an essay that sparked my interest for today's topic: "Jungle Fumble: A Brief History of and an Inside Look at the Ecuador Lawsuit Against Texaco/Chevron." "Jungle Fumble" is a hat tip to the Rumble in the Jungle, the boxing match between George Foreman and Muhammad Ali in the mid-seventies, and a brilliant way for you to play on that title. So thank you for that. Do you want to talk a little bit more about how you came up with "Jungle Fumble"?

Dave: Well, it was a clash of titans—a very well-financed lawsuit on one side going after a major oil company (Aguinda v. Texaco, Inc.). It was part of the whole, what we now think of as environmental justice or whatever activity. So yeah, that's basically how and why.

Jungle Fumble – Ecuador and Texaco

Traci: Well, it's a brilliant title to the essay. I want to read the first few paragraphs to set the table for us, and then we can go on from there:

"This story, like all good tales, starts with 'Once upon a time.' That time was the mid-1960s in northeastern Ecuador on the Augarico River in a concession area granted by the government of Ecuador. Texaco went to the concession area and found oil. As a result, Texaco started a drilling program, which would lead to the formation of a consortium that was formed in 1972. The impact of oil development on the Amazon region was tremendous. Texaco and its Petro Ecuador partner drilled over 300 wells. In order to support the development of wells, roads were built, pipelines were built, and equipment was moved in. The consortium also built three refineries and a number of separation stations."

I'm going to stop there because I want you to walk us through the original contamination case for Ecuador. What happened in the Amazon rainforest, and what role did Texaco—later acquired by Chevron—play? I know that's a big thing, but we're going to get into it.

Dave: I think I can handle that. The whole idea of environmental justice or reparations started back in the sixties with Judith Kimerling. Kimerling was an environmental activist and attorney. Last I looked the other day, she's still listed as active at one of the New York law schools. She was involved heavily in the Love Canal lawsuit. I had no direct knowledge of her, but she wrote a book called, I think it was "Amazon Crude" or something like that, and that exposed some of the contamination and mistreatment of the Amazon by Texaco.

Now, to be specific, Texaco went down to Ecuador to this area originally called "the empty lands"—the empty lands because nobody spoke Spanish. There were half a dozen, maybe four or five, native tribes. And Texaco at the time just rode roughshod over everything.

Now understand and set the table: there were no environmental laws until 1973 in the US, and there was no requirement for US corporations to behave in accordance with US laws abroad. So as a consequence, Texaco—or TexPet—went in and did what they thought was best and most economical for their bottom line.

One of the things that they did was dispose of a lot of produced water. When you drill an oil well and you're pulling up fluid out of the well, the petroleum in that fluid would be anywhere from a fifth to a third of the volume of the fluid. The rest of it is formation water. Formation water has a lot of dissolved hydrocarbons—everything that's in the formation is basically dissolved, plus the drill fluids. They just dumped this untreated into the Amazon rather than re-inject it because it would save them between one and three dollars a barrel in cost for drilling wells. Reinjecting waste would've saved a lot of people a lot of headaches, but it was deemed too expensive, and they decided not to do it.

Ecuador at that time—and maybe still is—was a very interesting place to do business. It's more a case of who you know and what you know. At one point, the Texaco corporation was dealing with various juntas, and the political corruption and bribery involved is just breathtaking.

So into this, Cristóbal Bonifaz was a Massachusetts attorney, and his son and Steven Donziger and Joe Kohn—Joe Kohn from Kohn, Swift & Graf, a firm out of Philadelphia—decided that there was a chance that they could do a class action lawsuit and force Texaco to do some cleanup and remediate some of the environmental damage that they had done by dumping all this into the Amazon.

In the process of drilling the wells—and in the period in question, they drilled something like 333 wells—each well has two pits. The pits are about half the size of a football field, and they contain everything that comes out of the well. That includes drilling fluids, muds, wastewater, and anything else. One of the problems was that in order to keep the well sterile—because bacteria love petroleum—one of the drilling fluids was using hexavalent chromium. Hexavalent chromium is a pretty lethal toxic substance, and this found its way into the drill pit water, along with all the other fluids.

Once you got the liquid out of the well, it had to be sent to a separation station where they did gravity separation. This was just a large tank or a series of large tanks, and they would skim off the oil and send that into a pipeline that they had built across the mountains to the Pacific port, where it would be put on a ship and taken up to somewhere in California.

So you have the formation water that represents about two-thirds of what was pumped out of the well—dumped into the Amazon—plus all of the residual from the separation stations and from the drill pits. All of this creates a rather nasty, toxic mess.

Now, the impact on the indigenous population was rather horrific because these people did not know any better, and yet they're washing in streams and bathing and drinking water that is contaminated with moderate to high levels of petroleum. It's something we would not have considered, and this was one of the things that was so incredible for the Lago Agrio plaintiffs. The Lago Agrio plaintiffs were a special class for this class action lawsuit. María Aguinda was the primary name, but there were about 75 plaintiffs who were told, "Sign this document, and when we collect money in this, we will pay you $25,000 as your share for participating in this lawsuit."

The lawsuit was filed probably in '98 or so. The challenge was that due to the political machinations in Ecuador, the government of Ecuador was continuing to pressure Texaco for a greater and greater share of the profits from the oil exploration. Texaco was also involved in a joint venture with Petroecuador, and ultimately in about '95, '98—somewhere in there—Texaco decided, "Nuts, we've had enough."

So they pulled out and got Woodward and Clyde to clean up and remediate one-third of the 330 pits. So they did about 133, 135 pits—somewhere in that range—and it resulted in a document that took several years. It was over two volumes. The total paper was over four inches thick with charts and graphs and tests and so on and so forth. At that point, the Texaco people got the government of Ecuador to sign a release saying, "We absolve you from all future liability. Goodbye."

As a complication of this whole thing, Texaco, which was at that point a New York corporation, reached to take over Getty Oil back in the United States, and that went to an $8 billion judgment against Texaco—I think it was by Pennzoil. Anyhow, that put a big dent in Texaco's capital reserves and made it ripe for takeover by Chevron. Chevron bought Texaco in about 2001 or so.

By 2003, Chevron no longer had assets in Ecuador, but yet they were being accused of contaminating all this land and creating all this pollution when, in actuality, they had not operated there for several years. It was primarily due to Petroecuador's operations. So into this whole situation, the lawsuit came up. It was first filed in New York and then later sent down to Ecuador as a forum of convenience because that's where the alleged faults were. We're now in 2003, and the trial's about to start. So that kind of brings you up to date in a rough analysis of where we are.

Heeding the Call for Contamination Remediation

Traci: What a web has been woven in this whole thing. What seemingly sounds like they're standing up for the folks in Ecuador and have their best interests at heart—I think we're going to find out that that's not really the case. I want to know, how did you become involved? We're up to the lawsuit being filed. How did you become involved?

Dave : Well, I was using an advisory service for attorneys, and I got a phone call—a reference from them. One day I got a phone call while I was sitting in my office: "We'd like to invite you up to New York to meet with our lead lawyer. We have a project for you." Okay. I went up and met Donziger. It was a cold call, basically. Saw him in his little tiny offices and learned a little bit about the case. Within a couple of weeks, he said, "I'd like you to get yourself down to Ecuador. We'll take care of your expenses and pay your salary and all that. We need you to do some work investigating this case in Ecuador." Okay.

My background had been dealing with some of the Love Canal and a lot of hazardous waste and things like that, so I felt very comfortable in doing that. In the summer of 2003, I found myself down in Ecuador and was immediately shown what they call "the toxic tour." The toxic tour was an organized activity where the people involved with Donziger were highlighting the bad environmental conditions that were left by the oil pits and the water that was still flowing. Realistically, it was rather horrific.

I was given about four or five days to look over these sites and then had to prepare a cost estimate. I did, and that cost estimate was wildly inaccurate, and that's where the term SWAG comes in, because I tried to do the best I could under the assumptions I was given—"Assume this, assume this, assume this"—without a chance to independently verify the amounts or quantities. I did my research on the costs of remediation, but for example, how does one remediate a Class Five rapids that's assumed to be contaminated where you have muds and soil in the bottom of the river? You have to divert the river, treat the water, clean up the soil, and then put the river back the way it was. Same thing with what they call a pantano—a pantano was a swamp. How do you ever manage to clean up a swamp without destroying it? Today it would be easier because we know a lot more, but it was still one of these things.

And then we had all these pits—supposedly 100 or maybe up to 300 pits. I don't remember the exact number now, but I was told to assume that all of the pits were operated by Texaco, and that just wasn't true. So the cost estimate came out at $6.1 billion, which was extremely high, and that number was introduced into the trial.

Traci: So you're saying without a chance to verify, they're giving you all of these assumptions, you come up with your SWAG, and we're at the point where we're in court and it's now on record?

Dave: Yep, that's right. The other thing that's interesting is the court proceedings in Ecuador use Napoleonic code. So unlike a US court, the Ecuadorian courts work backwards in that you go to court, the attorneys make their statements, some witnesses make their statements, and then the judge goes out and appoints three individuals called peritos—which is a Spanish word—one for the plaintiff, one for the defendant, and then the judge has his own. Then they go to the field and verify and get the data. Once the data is all in, then the judge sits down and makes his decision. But this is done site by site by site, and there were initially, I think, 140-some sites to be inspected at the rate of about two per week by the fall of 2004.

We started the process, and it's an incredible circus because we are out in the jungle. There is no power, so everything is done off of portable generators and laptops. The judge sits under—court is held under—big canopy tents. The attorneys come in and argue their case, and then they say to the peritos, "Okay, go get samples from this area or go get samples from this area and then report to the court back by such and such a date." Then that becomes part of the court record. Then a couple days later, they go onto the next site. Same sort of procedure.

It was really a circus. One of the gals working for us said, "I want a wedding tent like that." It was that elaborate. The tents by themselves were probably 15 or 20 feet deep by maybe 70 or 80 feet wide, and there were usually two of them. Of course, everything has to be catered, and there's food and drink and everything else. So it's really kind of a big show.

Cementing Fraud

Traci: Now, when did it start to become evident—you alluded to it under the assumption that Texaco was doing all of this—when did it become apparent that this may not be the case?

Dave: Well, there's a couple of things there. When we started taking samples, we couldn't find a good local laboratory, and we're trying to compete with a big corporation that has its own laboratory facilities. You're trying to do one-on-one matching to make sure that their analytical results are the same as your analytical results, and that was almost an impossible task. So we had to send some samples back to the US.

Well, when Chuck Calmbacher and I got the first set of samples back, we said, "Hey, there's something wrong here," because the contamination that they were looking for—yeah, there was some—but this was a site that had been cleaned up, and there was no primary contamination. The primary four elements—BTEX: benzene, toluene, ethylbenzene, and xylene—were all missing, indicating that over time and whatever the efforts of the cleanup, these were just not present. Yes, there were other chemicals present in the soil, but at much, much, much lower toxicity. We complained and were told, "Shut up and soldier on," which we did.

But then it became evident when we did some of the initial follow-up inspections in the field and we're looking at and scouting some of the sites that we needed to sample. There was rather clear evidence that a lot of these sites—like the separation stations—had flowing discharges into the waterways. We knew at that point that Texaco or Chevron had had no further activity in several years. So the question becomes, "Well, where's this coming from?" And the answer is Petroecuador.

Chevron Files RICO Lawsuit

Traci: So it's pointing back to Ecuador at this point in time. The trial has gone through, you're soldiering on, and the Ecuadorian court awarded $9.5 billion in damages to the locals, partially based on your $6.1 billion remediation estimate. Chevron responded by withdrawing its assets from Ecuador and filed a RICO suit—racketeering charges typically used against organized crime—against Steven Donziger that you've been talking about. Let's talk about that. What's going on here?

Dave: You have to understand that Donziger was instrumental in corrupting the entire investigation process in Ecuador, from the standpoint of bribing the judge and getting a special—the judge's master, or his perito—who was supposed to be neutral and independent. It was really a Donziger plant, and Donziger and his merry band wrote the conclusions. The perito, Richard Cabrera, didn't actually write the report himself, but he was paid, I think, $300,000 to sign his name to something.

Similarly, they had corrupted the judge with a similar-sized bribe, and somebody else ghost-wrote a report for him that he said, "Oh, yes, I'm very familiar with all this." But yet when it got down to the rubber meeting the road—or in this case, when the tires run over the oil-filled roads that have been sprayed with crude to keep down the dust—it just began to reek. The whole thing, even to the standpoint that the Ecuadorian court came up with this crazy number—$19 billion—but if you apologize, we'll reduce it to $9.5 billion.

So the point was to try and scare Chevron into settling. To his credit, the president or chairman of Chevron said, basically, "We will fight this judgment until hell freezes over, and then we'll strap on our skates and fight it on the ice." And realistically, I can understand that. That was a well-done decision on his part.

When the judgment came through, one of the other things that happened was there was a movie called "Crude," and Donziger, in his oversized ego, allowed the people who filmed "Crude" almost unrestricted access to his proceedings and deliberations. In the process, they produced two versions. One was a Netflix documentary, and the other one was a full-scale movie. There were slightly different versions, and in one of them, I think it was Cabrera showed up in the Netflix document, but he was not mentioned or not visible in the movie document. That alerted Chevron: "There's something wrong here," because then they had candid proof that Cabrera was dealing with the plaintiffs rather than being the independent expert for the court.

There were a lot more things that came out later on, and that story—we don't have two days for that.

Traci: And I want to point out, these aren't accusations and assumptions on your part. These things have been proven.

Dave: Yes, ma'am. These things have been proven. What happened ultimately is Chevron began taking depositions from various people, and then somebody said, "Well, this looks like a criminal enterprise," and they said, "Oh my God, it may be." That, I think, started the road down to where they had to do something to break the judgment. Otherwise, what would've happened is that if the judgment had stood up and they couldn't get it thrown out, the plaintiffs could have taken it to the International Court in The Hague and had it enforced against Chevron.

Well, Chevron had no assets in Ecuador at the time, so it would've attacked their basic worldwide infrastructure, and we're talking between $9.5 billion and $19.5 billion. That's a considerable sum of money.

So they went in and did some investigation, and when they started, they found out that it was fraud—to their satisfaction—and they filed a RICO lawsuit. They got the outtakes from both the Netflix documentary and the movie, and that really lit the fire. Then when they had a lot of the facts, they deposed more people, and the story started to unravel. As it unraveled, it became very, very clear that this whole thing was built on a case of elaborate lies and data falsifications.

That's why I think Chevron—I would've done the same thing if I had the money—because it was an unconscionable smear. Now, was there justification? Not really. But the point was that Texaco did a lot of environmental damage, but it tends to be somewhat temporary, and there was a lot more that was ongoing from Petroecuador. Yet the government of Ecuador and Petroecuador did not want to acknowledge any of their own mistakes. And as a matter of fact, the agreements that they had with everybody in filing this lawsuit was, "Well, let's stick it to the Yankee, and we'll do what we can." That's basically what was going on. It was a great big fraud.

So I think it was 2013—the trial went forward up in New York in the Southern District of New York. I and many other people were called as witnesses to what was going on.

Retaliation or Prosecuting Fraud?

Traci: That does indeed answer my question. I know that some critics argue that this case represents corporate retaliation against environmental lawyers. Others say it's about prosecuting fraud. How do you respond to both of those perspectives?

Dave: Are you familiar with what Dick the Butcher said in Shakespeare's Henry VI? "First, let's kill all the lawyers."

Was there some retaliation? Yeah, I think so. Was it about fraud? Definitely. But the point was, if it's about fraud, somebody has to be committing the fraud. So who was doing that? That was why the RICO lawsuit was formed.

As a result of the RICO lawsuit, Joe Kohn, when he found out the degree of deception that Donziger and company had been doing, pulled his funding. Burford, which was another company that had been funding that lawsuit, they pulled out. Patton Boggs—I don't think they pulled out. I think they got tagged with a rather sizable penalty. Patton Boggs is a Washington, DC law firm.

Anyhow, there are a number of people who really had their careers ruined by this particular activity, not the least of which was Stratus Environmental—Doug Beltman and his team—because they received fantastic sums for manufacturing data for the alleged lawsuit that led to the initial $9.5 billion judgment.

So was it retaliation? Yeah. Was it environmental justice? Yeah. A little bit of both. I think that's the best answer.

Traci: Looking back, would you do anything differently knowing what you know now?

Dave: I would be much more cautious about the politics of the surrounding environment. How is the data going to be used? What is the other side? Where are the cautions?

I'm patting myself on the back a little bit, but at some point, I pulled out because I could just not see where we were going with this thing and didn't want any part of it. When we looked for the data and did not find evidence of the contamination, it became very clear later on of the fraudulent nature of the court.

Both Chuck Calmbacher and I were not only acquitted, but we had had some initial tarnishing of our reputations because we had been working with Donziger against Chevron. But the trial and all that restored our reputations. We were not even a party to any of the proceedings from Chevron. We cooperated fully with Chevron, and they thanked us.

Traci: Cooperating with the data that you found that didn't match up with what they were saying.

Dave: Exactly, exactly. They even went so far as—one of the first things that we found upsetting in the trial: Chuck and I wrote a report on the first set of samples in the investigation, and Chuck wasn't feeling well at the time. The report had to be in Spanish and sent to the court by a certain date. So what he did was he wrote the report in English, he signed it, I signed it, and we sent the original plus some blank pages down there so that they could reformat and put the report into Spanish.

Well, we found out that what they did was they took our report, rewrote the report, rewrote the conclusions, attached our names to them, and submitted them to the court. That's a big no-no in my book, and that's one of the reasons why we had some initial blowback.

What I would do first is I would find out what the politics of the situation are, why this particular situation is occurring, and do my own investigating a little bit before I would accept something that big or that important.

The Bottom Line

Traci: What do you want people to understand about this case that might have gotten lost in the legal complexity? There was a lot of stuff we covered.

Dave: The case is over. It's been settled. Donziger has been, I think, disbarred and humiliated. At one point, he was wearing an ankle monitor and under house arrest. It doesn't seem to have quieted his ego any, but at least it's taken him down maybe a peg or two.

What would I like somebody to know? Hard to say because there was so much hype and so much deception on both sides. I think the best record of the whole thing is in Judge Kaplan's verdict. The documents that are supported in Kaplan's verdict—I think his opinion runs almost 500 pages—and he does a very good job, a very thorough job, of laying out all of the situation and exposing the fraud.

There was too much money at stake and too little responsibility from the government of Ecuador. There was a recognition that they did not want to take care of their own citizens, and there was plenty of corruption to go around. So you have to watch out for what you're going into and look for the corruption. It's done me a world of good in that I am very conscious about corruption now when I go into something. I go in with my eyes wide open.

Traci: Well, Dave, I want to thank you for sharing this story. It's fascinating. I know that we could talk for another several hours on this just going through the ins and outs of everything. So I do appreciate the time that you put into this. I'm going to link to your essay in the transcript of this podcast so folks can read the full thing for themselves.

Subscribe to this free podcast via your favorite podcast platform to learn best practices and keen insight from industry leaders. You can also visit us at chemicalprocessing.com for more tools and resources aimed at helping you achieve success. On behalf of Dave, I'm Traci, and this is Chemical Processing's Distilled podcast. Thanks for listening. Thanks again, Dave. I appreciate it.