Posted for Anjali Nayar
The Nigerian senate has set a new deadline for oil companies to end gas flaring; December 13, 2010, reports ThisDay, a daily Nigerian newspaper.
The deadline will be binding once a bill, called the Gas Flaring (Prohibition and Punishment) Bill 2009, is passed in the National Assembly.
It’s not the first time a date has been set for oil companies in the Niger Delta to clean up their act. Nigeria first outlawed gas flaring in 1979. Over the years, the main oil companies in the region – Shell Petroleum Development Company (SPDC), ExxonMobil and Chevron – have all set targets for the phase-out that didn’t materialize. The last deadline, in December 2008, also went by without action.
“It’s a history of shifting goal posts, missing deadline after deadline,” Vivian Bellonwu, a local activist told the ”https://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/africa/7820384.stm">BBC in January.
The cheapest way to deal with gas, a byproduct from crude oil extraction, is by burning it. According to the World Bank’s Global Gas Flaring Reduction Partnership, Nigeria flared around 16.8 billion cubic meters of natural gas in 2007, about 2.5% of the natural gas consumption in the US. Burning the gas also produces small amounts of over 250 toxins.
Of course, if the natural gas was allowed to seep out without burning, it would have a much greater environmental impact. Campaigners would like to see it captured instead.
The announcement of the new deadline comes just a few days before Shell, a major player in Nigerian oil, will appear in US federal courts on charges of complicity in several cases of human rights abuses, including the 1995 execution of activist Ken Saro-Wiwa.
Saro-Wiwa won the Goldman Environmental Prize the same year for his work in protesting the environmental destruction of the Niger Delta by oil companies.
This new court case was brought forward by Ken Saro-Wiwa’s son, Ken Wiwa Jr. and family members of other executed activists, and is supported by various international organizations such as the Centre for Constitutional Rights, a non-profit legal organization based in New York, says Steve Kretzmann from Oil Change International.
Shell maintains that the allegations that it “was complicit in the execution of Ken Saro-Wiwa and his peers are baseless,” says Adam Newton, a spokesman for Shell in the Hague.
According to satellite data put out by the World Bank’s Global Gas Flaring Reduction Partnership (GGFR), Nigeria flared around 16.8 billion cubic meters of natural gas in 2007, second only to Russia.
You can watch a NOAA/GGFR video of gas flaring here.
Shell maintains it has reduced its gas flaring by over 50% between 2002-2007, but “regrettably security issues that prevent access to key construction sites and a lack of funding from a major partner continue to delay projects” to minimize flaring, says Malcolm Brinded, the Executive Director of Exploration and Production at Shell.
According to Brinded, more than 3 billion dollars are needed to stop Shell’s gas flaring in Nigeria.
Nigeria’s oil sector provides the country with about 95% of its foreign exchange earnings and about 80% of its government revenue.
Image: Friends of the Earth International