TGP is made up a consortium that includes Argentine firms Techint and Pluspetrol, Hunt Oil from Texas, the Algerian state-owned oil and gas company Sonatrach, and South Korea's SK Corporation among other companies. In its report, E-Tech points out that the Camisea Project is the largest natural gas project in the history of Peru. The project is located in the ecologically-sensitive and diverse lower Urubamba area in the Amazon jungle, through the which two pipelines carry gas and natural gas liquids (NGL) across the Andes to an NGL processing plant and marine terminal in Paracas on the Pacific coast. There have been five ruptures in the NGL pipeline since the project began operation in August 2004, which have caused ecological damage, injured members of the community, and shaken confidence in the integrity of the pipelines. These ruptures have also generated heated debate among the conservation community, local indigenous communities, the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB) – a co-funder of the project –, the Camisea Project consortium, and the government of Peru over what went wrong, who is responsible, and what must be done to fix the problems. E-Tech was asked to evaluate technical and environmental impacts of the Camisea Project following a meeting of environmental groups (WWF, BIC, ED, and FoE) in Washington, DC, in October, 2003, when the project was still under construction. The IDB loan conditions included a provision for an independent environmental and social monitoring programme to begin in August, 2004, the date anticipated for project start-up. With support from Oxfam America in early 2004, the firm's staff visited Peru's Ministry of Energy and Mines and other governmental, academic, and community stakeholders in the country, to define the substantive elements of the proposed monitoring programme. Following this, a programme was drafted and submitted to these stakeholders and the IDB in June, 2004. p> The Camisea NGL pipeline ruptured for the first time in November, 2004, three months after the pipeline became operational. By early 2005, E-Tech was analysing potential causes of the pipeline breaks with assistance from anonymous pipeline safety experts, and calling for complete hydrostatic testing of the entire pipeline. In the autumn of 2005, after four ruptures had occurred in only 15 months of operation, and there was no sign of any comprehensive action on the part of the Peruvian government or the IDB to determine the cause of these ruptures, E-Tech hired – at its own expense – an experienced pipeline inspector, Carlos Salazar, to work with its chief engineer Bill Powers to assess the causes of these ruptures. Mr Salazar had worked as an inspector on the Camisea Project for a year-and-a-half during pipeline construction, and had expressed interest in early 2004 in working with E-Tech on the independent monitoring programme. The E-Tech report on the pipeline ruptures, released in late February 2006, detailed the pipeline construction deficiencies that were the probable causes of the pipeline breaks, identified locations where faulty welding, inadequately installation, and unstable soil conditions could result in future ruptures, and recommended specific measures for conducting an independent pipeline audit. Five days after the release of the report, the fifth NGL pipeline rupture occurred (on 4 March) within a kilometre of one of the locations identified in the E-Tech report as a high-risk location. The fire that followed the fifth rupture injured two members of the nearby community. E-Tech laid-out the specifics of a comprehensive pipeline audit and the likely testing and repair costs for the NGL pipeline amidst a highly-publicized furore over the next four months, and the controversy surrounding the ruptures, generated in part by the E-Tech report, was a major issue in the 2006 Peruvian presidential and congressional elections. Prior to these, in April the Peruvian congress established a special congressional committee to investigate both the ruptures and the veracity of the claims by E-Tech and other observers of hurried and substandard construction by the Camisea consortium. E-Tech's Bill Powers testified before the committee in Lima on 9 May, and the committee's report, issued in late June, reached the same conclusions as those identified in the E-Tech report on a number of key substantive issues, including hurried construction, lack of adequate geotechnical analysis or erosion control, lack of adequate supervision, and the need to define the scope and cost of the repair project. The selection of a pipeline auditor was suspended by the Ministry of Energy and Mines on 12 July. This was seen an important development, as the accelerated process being used by the Ministry to select an auditor lacked transparency and appeared to be an attempt to control the auditor selection by the same government officials that had failed to adequately supervise the construction of the pipelines. The postponement is allowing the incoming Garcia administration more time to select the firm that will audit the pipelines and recommend repairs. One of the most important documents presented by E-Tech is a 'nonconformity report' by a field inspector with Gulf Interstate Engineering (GIE), a consultancy hired by Techint during the pipelines' construction. The report states that after inspecting 26 welds along a 300-m length of the pipeline, the inspector found that unqualified welders had been used, in contravention of the API international code and the specifications for the Camisea project. The nonconformity report includes a section where the contractor – in this case, Techint – is to describe the measures to be taken to remedy the problem: but that part of the document remains blank. The E-Tech audit provides photos which show other serious defects, such as stretches of pipeline that were hastily and only partially backfilled, pipes that were exposed for a long time to the elements before they were buried, and pipes that can be seen to be lying in water and corroding.