More than six decades of pumping oil has left Bayelsa state “in the grip of a human and environmental catastrophe of unimaginable proportions,” according to research published by a panel set up by the local government. — Bloomberg
ABUJA: Oil companies including Shell Plc and Eni SpA should pay US$12bil (RM54bil) to repair environmental devastation in Nigeria’s crude-rich Niger Delta, a new report says.
More than six decades of pumping oil has left Bayelsa state “in the grip of a human and environmental catastrophe of unimaginable proportions,” according to research published by a panel set up by the local government.
The extraction of crude is “the overwhelmingly evident cause of this disaster” in the state, home to more than two million people, it said.
The Bayelsa State Oil & Environmental Commission, established in 2019 by a former governor of the southern state, released its final report yesterday.
British lawmaker and former Archbishop of York, John Sentamu, chaired the London-headquartered commission, whose research was conducted by a group of international experts.
The area that is today Bayelsa was the first place in West Africa to produce commercial quantities of oil in the late 1950s.
Since then, firms – mainly Shell and Eni – have pumped billions of barrels of crude from beneath the state’s land, swamps and waterways.
Spills from their infrastructure have transformed the region into “one of the most polluted places on Earth,” according to the commission’s report.
A spokesman for Shell’s Nigerian subsidiary declined to comment on the report, saying the company was not “privy” to the commission’s allegations and recommendations.
Eni did not respond to a request for comment.
The oil companies said outside interference – by thieves and saboteurs – rather than equipment failure was to blame for the overwhelming majority of leaks from their facilities.
But the firms had failed to “properly invest in, maintain, manage and protect pipelines” that developed spills at a rate “unparalleled when compared to other major oil-producing countries,” the report said.
There were also “strong reasons to believe that the official statistics significantly and systematically over-stated the number of leaks caused by sabotage while downplaying those attributable to other causes,” it said.
About one-fifth of Nigeria’s oil output comes from Bayelsa – with almost all the rest being pumped from other states in the Niger Delta or off the country’s shores.
While international majors for decades produced most of the nation’s crude in partnership with the state energy company, they have been selling onshore and shallow-water licences to local companies in recent years.
The oil majors that have extracted crude in Bayelsa and the state-owned Nigerian National Petroleum Co (NNPC) should invest US$12bil (RM54bil) to restore impacted areas, create new jobs, provide drinking water and treat health problems, according to the report.
The fund’s work will require a “parallel bureaucracy” involving both domestic and international oversight, it said.
The commission also recommended an overhaul of the regulatory and legal regime to allow heftier penalties, introduce a fast-track arbitration body and remove the influence of producers from the “fundamentally compromised” spill inspection process.
The government departments tasked with enforcing environmental standards lacked “capacity, independence and influence,” it said. The NNPC, National Oil Spill Detection & Response Agency and Nigerian Upstream Petroleum Regulatory Commission did not respond to requests for comment. — Bloomberg
