The Alaska Native group REDOIL has joined with eight environmental groups in an effort to stop a drilling ship from drilling in Arctic waters, the Associated Press reports.
The drilling ship Noble Discoverer, operating for Shell Oil, was granted an air quality permit by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to drill three exploratory wells in the Chukchi Sea off Alaska’s northwest coast this summer.
REDOIL (Resisting Environmental Destruction on Indigenous Lands) has joined Alaska Wilderness League, Center for Biological Diversity, Natural Resources Defense Council, Northern Alaska Environmental Center, Oceana, Pacific Environment, Sierra Club and The Wilderness Society in suing the 9th Circuit Court.
According to AP, Colin O’Brien, an attorney for Earthjustice, an environmental law firm representing the groups, said “We think EPA took shortcuts. … We believe the permit failed to ensure that all air pollution controls are in place and that all standards are met for this major new source of pollution in the Arctic.”
A Shell spokeswoman said that the company’s vessels met EPA standards, but O’Brien disputes this. Shell hopes to send a second drill ship, the Kulluk, to the area, and the Discoverer would be accompanied by more than a dozen support ships. O’Brien says that EPA “only required [the] new [emissions] technology on the Discoverer drill ship and failed to hold Shell’s other vessels to the same standards.”
A major oil spill in the Niger Delta was far worse than Shell previously admitted, according to an independent assessment obtained by Amnesty International and the Centre for Environment, Human Rights and Development (CEHRD), which exposes how the oil giant dramatically under-estimated the quantities involved.
The spill in 2008, caused by a fault in a Shell pipeline, resulted in tens of thousands of barrels of oil polluting the land and creek surrounding Bodo, a Niger Delta town of some 69,000 people.
The previously unpublished assessment, carried out by US firm Accufacts, found that between 1,440 and 4,320 barrels of oil were flooding the Bodo area each day following the leak. The Nigerian regulators have confirmed that the spill lasted for 72 days.
Shell’s official investigation report claims only 1,640 barrels of oil were spilt in total. But based on the independent assessment the total amount of oil spilt over the 72 day period is between 103,000 barrels and 311,000 barrels.
Audrey Gaughran, Director of Global Issues at Amnesty International, said:
“The difference is staggering: even using the lower end of the Accufacts estimate, the volume of oil spilt at Bodo was more than 60 times the volume Shell has repeatedly claimed leaked.
“Even if we use the start date given by Shell, the volume of oil spilt is far greater than Shell recorded.”
Shell’s oil spill investigation report also claims that the spill started on 5 October 2008 – while the community and Nigerian regulators have confirmed a start date of 28 August 2008.
What is not in dispute is that Shell did not stop the spill until 7 November – four weeks after it claims it began – and 10 weeks after the start date given by the community and the regulator.
Converting the amount into litres, Shell’s figure is just over 260,000 litres, while the lowest estimate based on the Accufacts assessment, and using Shell’s start date, would be 7.8 million litres.
However, using the start date given by the community and regulator and the higher end of the estimate, then it is possible that as much as over 49 million litres of oil spilt at Bodo.
The publication of the independent assessment coincides with a global week of action in which people from across the world are calling on Shell to stop hiding from the devastating impact of its operations in the Niger Delta on people’s lives and the environment.
The serious under-recording at Bodo also has wider implications: Shell repeatedly claims to its investors, customers and the media that the majority of the oil spilt in the Niger Delta is caused by sabotage.
The basis for this claim is the oil spill investigation process, which is deeply flawed and lacks credibility. The cause of spills, the volume of oil spilt, and other important parameters like the start date, are not recorded in any credible way.
Bodo is one example but Amnesty International and CEHRD have also exposed serious failings in other oil spill investigations.
Both organisations have repeatedly called for an independent process for investigation of oil spills, and an end to the system that allows oil companies to have such influence over the process.
Shell initially claimed to the media that 85 per cent of oil spilt in the Niger Delta in 2008 was caused by sabotage. The company later admitted that this figure did not include a major oil spill that was subsequently found to be due to operational failures.
Based on the new evidence obtained by Amnesty International and CEHRD about the 2008 Bodo oil spill more than half of the oil spilt in the Niger Delta in 2008 was due to operational failures – and possibly as much as 80 per cent. However, given the serious flaws in the oil spill investigation process, all oil spills would have to be subjected to independent assessment to obtain accurate figures.
Audrey Gaughran said:
“Sabotage is a real and serious problem in the Niger Delta, but Shell misuses the issue as a PR shield and makes claims that simply don’t stand up to scrutiny.”
More than three years after the Bodo oil spill, Shell has yet to conduct a proper clean up or to pay any official compensation to the affected communities. After years of trying to seek justice in Nigeria the people of Bodo have now taken their claim to the UK courts.
Patrick Naagbanton, Coordinator of CEHRD, added:
“The evidence of Shell’s bad practice in the Niger Delta is mounting. Shell seems more interested in conducting a PR operation than a clean-up operation. The problem is not going away; and sadly neither is the misery for the people of Bodo.”
This week thousands of activists in more than 14 countries – from Japan to Sweden, Senegal to the USA, as well as in Shell’s home countries the Netherlands and the United Kingdom – are taking part in events and protests, including outside Shell’s offices and petrol stations, calling on Shell to clean up its act in the Niger Delta.
Amnesty International is also running an online petition calling on Shell’s Chief Executive Peter Vosser to act.
The week will reach a climax when affected communities stage a peaceful demonstration outside Shell’s offices in Port Harcourt in the Niger Delta.
“The fishermen have never seen anything like this,” Dr Jim Cowan told Al Jazeera. “And in my 20 years working on red snapper, looking at somewhere between 20 and 30,000 fish, I’ve never seen anything like this either.”
Dr Cowan, with Louisiana State University’s Department of Oceanography and Coastal Sciences started hearing about fish with sores and lesions from fishermen in November 2010.
Cowan’s findings replicate those of others living along vast areas of the Gulf Coast that have been impacted by BP’s oil and dispersants.
Gulf of Mexico fishermen, scientists and seafood processors have told Al Jazeera they are finding disturbing numbers of mutated shrimp, crab and fish that they believe are deformed by chemicals released during BP’s 2010 oil disaster.
Along with collapsing fisheries, signs of malignant impact on the regional ecosystem are ominous: horribly mutated shrimp, fish with oozing sores, underdeveloped blue crabs lacking claws, eyeless crabs and shrimp – and interviewees’ fingers point towards BP’s oil pollution disaster as being the cause.
Eyeless shrimp
Tracy Kuhns and her husband Mike Roberts, commercial fishers from Barataria, Louisiana, are finding eyeless shrimp.
“At the height of the last white shrimp season, in September, one of our friends caught 400 pounds of these,” Kuhns told Al Jazeera while showing a sample of the eyeless shrimp.
According to Kuhns, at least 50 per cent of the shrimp caught in that period in Barataria Bay, a popular shrimping area that was heavily impacted by BP’s oil and dispersants, were eyeless. Kuhns added: “Disturbingly, not only do the shrimp lack eyes, they even lack eye sockets.”
“Some shrimpers are catching these out in the open Gulf [of Mexico],” she added, “They are also catching them in Alabama and Mississippi. We are also finding eyeless crabs, crabs with their shells soft instead of hard, full grown crabs that are one-fifth their normal size, clawless crabs, and crabs with shells that don’t have their usual spikes … they look like they’ve been burned off by chemicals.”
On April 20, 2010, BP’s Deepwater Horizon oilrig exploded, and began the release of at least 4.9 million barrels of oil. BP then used at least 1.9 million gallons of toxic Corexit dispersants to sink the oil.
Keath Ladner, a third generation seafood processor in Hancock County, Mississippi, is also disturbed by what he is seeing.
“I’ve seen the brown shrimp catch drop by two-thirds, and so far the white shrimp have been wiped out,” Ladner told Al Jazeera. “The shrimp are immune compromised. We are finding shrimp with tumors on their heads, and are seeing this everyday.”
While on a shrimp boat in Mobile Bay with Sidney Schwartz, the fourth-generation fisherman said that he had seen shrimp with defects on their gills, and “their shells missing around their gills and head”.
“We’ve fished here all our lives and have never seen anything like this,” he added.
Ladner has also seen crates of blue crabs, all of which were lacking at least one of their claws.
Darla Rooks, a lifelong fisherperson from Port Sulfur, Louisiana, told Al Jazeera she is finding crabs “with holes in their shells, shells with all the points burned off so all the spikes on their shells and claws are gone, misshapen shells, and crabs that are dying from within … they are still alive, but you open them up and they smell like they’ve been dead for a week”.
Rooks is also finding eyeless shrimp, shrimp with abnormal growths, female shrimp with their babies still attached to them, and shrimp with oiled gills.
“We also seeing eyeless fish, and fish lacking even eye-sockets, and fish with lesions, fish without covers over their gills, and others with large pink masses hanging off their eyes and gills.”
Rooks, who grew up fishing with her parents, said she had never seen such things in these waters, and her seafood catch last year was “ten per cent what it normally is”.
“I’ve never seen this,” he said, a statement Al Jazeera heard from every scientist, fisherman, and seafood processor we spoke with about the seafood deformities.
Given that the Gulf of Mexico provides more than 40 per cent of all the seafood caught in the continental US, this phenomenon does not bode well for the region, or the country.
BP’s chemicals?
“The dispersants used in BP’s draconian experiment contain solvents, such as petroleum distillates and 2-butoxyethanol. Solvents dissolve oil, grease, and rubber,” Dr Riki Ott, a toxicologist, marine biologist and Exxon Valdez survivor told Al Jazeera. “It should be no surprise that solvents are also notoriously toxic to people, something the medical community has long known”.
The dispersants are known to be mutagenic, a disturbing fact that could be evidenced in the seafood deformities. Shrimp, for example, have a life-cycle short enough that two to three generations have existed since BP’s disaster began, giving the chemicals time to enter the genome.
Pathways of exposure to the dispersants are inhalation, ingestion, skin, and eye contact. Health impacts can include headaches, vomiting, diarrhea, abdominal pains, chest pains, respiratory system damage, skin sensitisation, hypertension, central nervous system depression, neurotoxic effects, cardiac arrhythmia and cardiovascular damage. They are also teratogenic – able to disturb the growth and development of an embryo or fetus – and carcinogenic.
Cowan believes chemicals named polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs), released from BP’s submerged oil, are likely to blame for what he is finding, due to the fact that the fish with lesions he is finding are from “a wide spatial distribution that is spatially coordinated with oil from the Deepwater Horizon, both surface oil and subsurface oil. A lot of the oil that impacted Louisiana was also in subsurface plumes, and we think there is a lot of it remaining on the seafloor”.
Marine scientist Samantha Joye of the University of Georgia published results of her submarine dives around the source area of BP’s oil disaster in the Nature Geoscience journal.
Her evidence showed massive swathes of oil covering the seafloor, including photos of oil-covered bottom dwelling sea creatures.
While showing slides at an American Association for the Advancement of Science annual conference in Washington, Joye said: “This is Macondo oil on the bottom. These are dead organisms because of oil being deposited on their heads.”
Dr Wilma Subra, a chemist and Macarthur Fellow, has conducted tests on seafood and sediment samples along the Gulf for chemicals present in BP’s crude oil and toxic dispersants.
“Tests have shown significant levels of oil pollution in oysters and crabs along the Louisiana coastline,” Subra told Al Jazeera. “We have also found high levels of hydrocarbons in the soil and vegetation.”
According to the US Environmental Protection Agency, PAHs “are a group of semi-volatile organic compounds that are present in crude oil that has spent time in the ocean and eventually reaches shore, and can be formed when oil is burned”.
“The fish are being exposed to PAHs, and I was able to find several references that list the same symptoms in fish after the Exxon Valdez spill, as well as other lab experiments,” explained Cowan. “There was also a paper published by some LSU scientists that PAH exposure has effects on the genome.”
The University of South Florida released the results of a survey whose findings corresponded with Cowan’s: a two to five per cent infection rate in the same oil impact areas, and not just with red snapper, but with more than 20 species of fish with lesions. In many locations, 20 per cent of the fish had lesions, and later sampling expeditions found areas where, alarmingly, 50 per cent of the fish had them.
“I asked a NOAA [National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration] sampler what percentage of fish they find with sores prior to 2010, and it’s one tenth of one percent,” Cowan said. “Which is what we found prior to 2010 as well. But nothing like we’ve seen with these secondary infections and at this high of rate since the spill.”
“What we think is that it’s attributable to chronic exposure to PAHs released in the process of weathering of oil on the seafloor,” Cowan said. “There’s no other thing we can use to explain this phenomenon. We’ve never seen anything like this before.”
Featured image: Barge transporting oil drums in the Niger Delta. Image by Stakeholder Democracy via Flickr (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0).
Oil has been spilling from a wellhead in Nigeria’s Bayelsa state for a month now, with the local company responsible unable to contain it.
Experts say the scale and duration of the spill is so severe that it’s imperative that local communities be relocated for their safety.
Oil spills and other forms of pollution caused by the industry are common in Bayelsa, the heart of the oil-rich Niger Delta.
Companies, including foreign oil majors, are largely left to self-declare the spills that frequently occur, but face only token fines for failing to respond quickly.
Crude oil from a blowout has been pouring into creeks in the Niger Delta since Nov. 5, with the well’s owner, Nigerian energy firm Aiteo, unable to contain the spill and specialists called in to help.
The blowout, at a non-producing well in the Santa Barbara field in Bayelsa state, has caused extensive pollution of rivers and farmland in the Nembe local government area, according to the state governor, Douye Diri. According to the News Agency of Nigeria, he said Aiteo should not think that “this criminal neglect of its facilities and disregard for human life and the environment, as demonstrated by its conduct, will not be accounted for.”
In a statement released Nov. 22, the company blamed the incident on sabotage. “Aiteo remains committed to ascertaining, immediately the well head is secure, the immediate and remote causes of the leak which will be driven by a [joint investigative visit] that will follow,” it said.
The oil industry in Nigeria attributes many oil spills to sabotage by people trying to steal crude. Nigeria’s National Oil Spill Detection and Response Agency (NOSDRA), which relies almost entirely on the industry itself for access to on- and offshore oil facilities, reports that around 75%of spills are caused by sabotage and theft.
The joint team initially despatched to the Nembe spill was unable to determine the cause of the spill, as the wellhead could not be accessed “due to hydrocarbon fumes that saturated the atmosphere in the area.” A video of the spill site, captured Nov. 29, showed a high-pressure stream of brownish liquid spraying through the creeks from a wellhead as technicians worked on the site.
The scale of the spill has overwhelmed local disaster response capabilities, and U.S.-headquartered oil-well control specialist Halliburton Boots and Coots has been drafted in to “kill the well,” a process that involves injecting cement into the well to plug it.
“Work is still ongoing at the site to stop the spill,” NOSDRA director-general Idris Musa told Mongabay last week, but all activities around the well were temporarily suspended Nov. 29 to allow the well-kill operation to proceed.
Decades of destruction
The Niger Delta is rich in biological diversity and natural resources. Its creeks, swamps and mangrove forests are home to fishing and farming communities as well as threatened species including manatees (Trichechus senegalensis), chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes ellioti), and the Niger Delta red colobus (Piliocolobus epieni).
But decades of oil production have made the region one of the most polluted places on Earth. NOSDRA recorded 639 oil spills in just the past two years, resulting in 28,003 barrels spewed into the environment, according to the agency’s data.
Bayelsa is where oil was first discovered in Nigeria, in 1956. In the decades since, oil spills from wells and pipelines have contaminated farmland and water bodies, and exposed residents to toxic chemicals. Flaring of gas has led to acid rain falling on the area, while contributing to making Nigeria the 17th largest producer of greenhouse gas emissions in the world.
This environmental destruction has been caused by oil majors including Shell, Chevron and Eni. The Nembe well was bought from Shell by Lagos-based Aiteo in 2015.
“It is extremely disturbing because the trend we are seeing now is that international oil companies know that their equipment are dilapidated, and to avoid responsibility, they move offshore and sell to gullible local companies who think they can make profit and are not ready or equipped to [deal with] this kind of emergencies,” said Nnimmo Bassey, an environmentalist and founder of the Health of Mother Earth Foundation (HOMEF), a prominent green NGO in Nigeria.
Dead and dying trees near the site of a previous Niger Delta oil spill in 2020. Image by Sosialistisk Ungdom (SU) via Flickr (CC BY-ND 2.0).
Consequences — just not for oil companies
The impact of the Nembe spill on local communities and the environment is still to be determined, but Samuel Oburo, an environmental activist affiliated with Friends of the Earth, who lives about 50 kilometers (30 miles) from Nembe, says villagers in the area have been badly impacted.
“I can tell you that the people there face great danger. They have started crying out. They have started experiencing strange illnesses due to the unfriendly atmosphere this spill has exposed the community to,” he told Mongabay over the phone.
But getting oil firms to clean up or pay for environmental crimes in Nigeria is difficult. Legal claims for compensation can take years, even decades, and companies are expected to pay relatively little in fines when they err.
NOSDRA’S regulations say oil companies have 24 hours to respond to the discovery of a spill. A joint visit by government agencies, company officials and community representatives should take place as soon as possible. But a 2018 study by Amnesty International found frequent delays, with some spills continuing for months after they were reported.
Shell, one of the largest operators in the country, visited spill sites within 24 hours on just 26% of occasions, Amnesty said. The slowest response time recorded was when Eni took 430 days to respond to a spill in Bayelsa state. “These delays point to serious negligence. Shell and Eni are wealthy, powerful multinationals: why can’t they act faster? Why can’t they do more?,” the report said.
But the penalties for noncompliance are negligible: 1 million naira ($2,400) for an initial default, and an additional 500,000 naira for every day after that.
“How much is N500,000 to an oil company?” NOSDRA’s Idris Musa said. An amendment increasing the fines is in progress.
Speaking to the ongoing spill at Nembe, HOMEF’s Bassey said that considering the apparent scale and duration of the latest spill, the safest option for residents of the area is to be relocated. “This area does not have pipe-borne water, and when the river is covered with crude oil, it means they have to depend on imported water,” he said. “Some may drink from that river because these areas are permanently polluted and they have no option. Children will swim in that river and people will drink from that river.”
“Crude oil contains very toxic heavy metals like lead; you know, lead affects a lot things concerning people, the nervous system, causes cancer. You have mercury in oil, you have cadmium, you have arsenic and benzene and many others,” he told Mongabay.
“So anybody eating fish from that river is in trouble already. So the relief that they are giving, I believe they should actually evacuate people from that territory at this time.”
Oburo agreed: “So long as the spill continues, there is nothing that can be done to restore the air quality. The only solution is to evacuate those people from there because their lives are precious.”
Bayelsa government spokesperson Dan Alabrah said the state is providing relief materials to communities, but had no plans to relocate them.
People often talk about ecological collapse as if it were a distant scenario that might play out in the future, but the reality is that the planet is currently in a state of collapse. This process has been underway for decades.
Perhaps nowhere is this more evident than Nigeria, the most populous nation in Africa and a state still emerging from its legacy as a principal hub of the transcontinental slave trade and decades of British colonial rule.
Although it has long since gained independence, Nigeria has been a virtual oil colony for more than 60 years. Multinational corporations such as Shell and Chevron essentially run the Nigerian government, funding corrupt politicians and military officers to quash all legitimate dissent. Despite the supposed shift to democracy in 1999, Nigeria remains an economic colony run by oligarchs and foreign corporations. Its current president is retired general Muhammadu Buhari, who some locals describe as “Mr. Oil.”[i]
The hardest-hit zone is the oil-rich Niger River Delta, a vast wetland that has been turned into a toxic cesspool by the equivalent of an Exxon-Valdez sized oil spill every single year. Between oil spills, acid rain, and water contamination, the residents of the Niger River Delta are on the front lines of the environmental and capitalist crisis.
In the 1990’s, political opposition to oil extraction in the Niger River Delta became widespread. Much of the resistance was led by women, as Nigeria has a long history of collective women’s action. But the most famous figure of the resistance was Ken Saro-Wiwa, a poet-turned activist who led the Movement for the Survival of the Ogoni people (MOSOP).
In 1995, Nigeria’s ruling military dictatorship arrested Saro-Wiwa along with 8 other leaders of MOSOP on trumped-up charges. They were tried and executed by hanging, and their bodies were dumped into a mass grave. This atrocity marked the end of the non-violent campaign in Nigeria and the beginning of a new phase of struggle.
In the mid-2000’s, a militant group emerged in Nigeria known as the Movement for the Emancipation of the Niger Delta—MEND. Born out of the failure of non-violence, MEND adopted radical new tactics: kidnapping oil workers for ransom, assassinating executives, and sabotaging oil pipelines, tankers, pump stations, offshore platforms, and other infrastructure.
MEND’s tactics have been innovative, using speed, stealth, and intelligence to target their attacks where they will do the most damage. At the height of their operations, MEND disabled a full half of all oil capacity in Nigeria, the largest oil exporting nation in Africa and a member of OPEC. One analyst writes that MEND’s targets have “been accurately selected to completely shut down production and delay/halt repairs.”[ii]
In 2006, MEND militants released a chilling letter reminding the oil companies of their total commitment.
“It must be clear that the Nigerian government cannot protect your workers or assets. Leave our land while you can or die in it,” the group wrote. “Our aim is to totally destroy the capacity of the Nigerian government to export oil.”[iii]
It is difficult for us to imagine the level of courage it takes for people from the Niger River Delta to rise up in the face of nearly impossible odds against Shell’s elite private mercenary armies and the American-trained special forces units of the Nigerian military.
But we must imagine it, and compare this to our own courage, or lack of courage.
Here in the United States, a grossly inequal and destructive society has been built on land stolen from indigenous people. Slaves built the American capitalism which today is maintained by weapons manufacturers, parasitic drug companies, predatory finance and investment banks, a private prison system that differs little from chattel slavery, and a global oil empire that has been built on the bones of the Ogoni people, on the total poisoning of the Gulf of Mexico, and on the tar sands, the largest and most destructive industrial project on Earth.
The signs of what is happening are so clear ignorance is a willful choice. Just a few days ago, the United Nations warned of imminent “ecosystem collapse.” The IPCC has issued warning after warning of the dire consequences of global warming. Plankton populations, the very foundation of oceanic life and the source of most of the world’s oxygen, are collapsing. Insect populations are collapsing. The last fragments of uncut forests around the world are falling to the chainsaw as fascists and militarists like Bolsonaro, Trump, Putin, Jinping, and Duterte sell off every last fragment of the planet to fund their nationalist, militarist dreams. Coral reefs are dying, wetlands are being drained, and rising seas are expected to make 2 billion people into refugees by century’s end.
As our world teeters on the brink of total ecological and social collapse, we have no more excuses. We have all the information and all the inspiration we need. The times are prompting us to exercise our “revolutionary right to dismember or overthrow” the systems that are murdering the planet and trampling human lives.
If we continue to take no action, we are all cowards. There is no other way to explain our inaction.
Max Wilbert is a third-generation organizer who grew up in Seattle’s post-WTO anti-globalization and undoing racism movement, and works with Deep Green Resistance. He is the author of two books.
[i] Nigeria Oil and Gas: An Introduction and Outlook. By Dele Ogun. Oil and Gas IQ. October 16, 2018. https://www.oilandgasiq.com/market-outlook/news/nigeria-oil-and-gas-an-introduction-and-outlook.
[ii] Nigerian Evoluition. Global Guerillas. January 2006. https://globalguerrillas.typepad.com/globalguerrillas/2006/01/nigerian_evolut.html.
[iii] NIGERIA: Shell may pull out of Niger Delta after 17 die in boat raid. By Daniel Howden. Corpwatch. January 17, 2006. https://corpwatch.org/article/nigeria-shell-may-pull-out-niger-delta-after-17-die-boat-raid.
