CLEANING UP a succession of oil spills in a region of the Niger delta on the coast of Nigeria that have occurred over five decades will cost $1 billion (€706.5 million) and take up to 30 years, according to a major UN report into oil contamination in the region.
The United Nations Environment Programme (Unep) says oil companies have for half a century systematically contaminated and failed to clean up a 1,000sq km area of Ogoniland, southeastern Nigeria, with devastating consequences for human health and wildlife.
A leaked summary of Unep’s Ogoniland study – the first major scientific study of pollution in the oil-rich area – calls for a $1 billion clean-up fund for spills and says it will take 25-30 years to restore the environment. Much of the funding for the clean-up would need to come from the oil companies.
The three-year-long investigation records heavy contamination of land and underground water courses more than 40 years after oil was spilled; communities’ drinking water contaminated with dangerous concentrations of benzene and other pollutants; and soil contamination reaching more than 5m deep in many areas.
It recommends that emergency measures be taken to warn communities and immediately sort out drinking-water wells, and that oil companies working throughout the delta should completely overhaul the way they operate.
The Unep team of more than 50 international pollution experts collected more than 4,000 samples of soil, fish and air and investigated in-depth 69 out of many hundreds of historical oil spills that have taken place in Ogoniland in the past 50 years.
The team studied 5,000 medical records and held 260 meetings with communities.
It is expected that the report will act as a baseline study for a massive clean-up operation that the UN wants to see.
Other findings include:
- Most of the oil spill sites that the companies claim to have cleaned up are still highly contaminated.
- Oil companies have dumped contaminated soil in unlined pits.
- Bodies of water are coated with hydrocarbons more than 1,000 times the level allowed by Nigerian drinking-water standards.
- Shell and other companies have not met minimum Nigerian requirements or their own standards.
Oil-drilling in Ogoniland ceased in 1994 after oil giant Shell was blamed for widespread pollution and for failing to help local development and was ejected from the area. More than £30 billion (€35 billion) worth of oil has been extracted from the area but the vast majority of people are worse off than before the firms arrived.
“Even though oil operations have ceased in Ogoniland, oil spills continue to occur in alarming regularity. Since life expectancy in Nigeria is less than 50 years it is a fair assumption that most people in Ogoniland have lived with chronic oil pollution throughout their lives,” the report says.
“Ogoniland has a tragic history of pollution but systematic scientific information has been absent about the ensuing contamination,” says the report.
Because oil company records and investigations of spills in the delta are heavily disputed and politically sensitive, the UN has been careful not to apportion blame for any particular spill.
But because Shell subsidiary Shell Petroleum Development Corporation, which works in partnership with the Nigerian government, has been by far the largest operator in the region, the report will be seen as effectively an investigation of their practices. The independent report was paid for in part by Shell, and commissioned by the Nigerian government.
The UN team was clearly shocked at some of their findings. In one place, Ejama Ebubu, the study found heavy contamination from a spill that took place more than 40 years ago “despite repeated clean up attempts”.
In Nisisoken Ogale in Eleme, close to a Nigerian national petroleum company pipeline, researchers found 8cm of refined oil floating on ground water that served community wells.
“Pollution of soil is extensive and widespread and severely impacting,” says the report, which was due to be presented to the president, Goodluck Jonathan, in the Nigerian state capital Abuja yesterday. “The widespread pollution of Ogoniland as documented does not come as a surprise because the manifestation is physical and people have been living in that putrid situation of decades now,” said Nnimmo Bassey, chair of Friends of the Earth International and director of Nigeria-based Environment Rights Action.
“Now we know that it will take up to 30 years to remediate the impacts, especially on the mangroves of the region. The entire saga smacks of a situation of complete livelihoods decimation of the Ogoni people.
“Unep’s recommendation that an environmental restoration fund for Ogoniland be set up with a take off sum of $1 billion is applauded. But we need a larger fund for the entire Niger delta.”
On Wednesday it was revealed that Shell had accepted responsibility for two massive oil spills in the region that devastated a community of 69,000 people. Combined, the spills could be larger than the 1989 Exxon Valdez disaster in Alaska and Shell faces a bill of hundreds of millions of dollars in compensation. – (Guardian service)