One of World's Most Polluted Spots Gets Worse as $1 Billion Cleanup Drags On (bloomberg.com) 32
Mismanagement, waste and lack of transparency are making the cleanup in the Niger Delta's Ogoniland anything but exemplary, UN reports indicate. From a report: In the more than a quarter century since Shell Plc left Ogoniland in southern Nigeria, oil has continued to ooze from dormant wellheads and active pipelines, leaving the 386-square mile kingdom's wetlands shimmering with a greasy rainbow sheen, its once-lush mangroves coated in crude, well-water smelling of benzene and farmlands charred and barren. So when the $1 billion Ogoniland cleanup began in 2019, backed by Shell's funding pledge and support from the United Nations, it was heralded as the most ambitious initiative of its kind anywhere in the world. But now, UN Environmental Programme documents seen by Bloomberg and reported for the first time indicate that the project -- far from being exemplary -- is making one of the earth's most polluted regions even dirtier.
"We had hoped that the Ogoniland cleanup process would set the standard for the cleanup that will have to take place in the Niger Delta as a whole," said Mike Karikpo, an Ogoni attorney with Friends of the Earth International. "But we've not seen any impact. There ought to be some impact on the lives and livelihoods of people whose lands and rivers were impacted by this oil." In a scathing review of the Ogoniland cleanup efforts, led by the Hydrocarbon Pollution Remediation Project, or Hyprep, the UN body paints a picture of rampant mismanagement, incompetence, waste and lack of transparency. It highlights the haphazard storage of oil-soaked soil that lets chemicals seep into uncontaminated grounds and creeks, contracts awarded to firms with little environmental-cleanup experience and proposals for millions of dollars in unneeded work.
"We had hoped that the Ogoniland cleanup process would set the standard for the cleanup that will have to take place in the Niger Delta as a whole," said Mike Karikpo, an Ogoni attorney with Friends of the Earth International. "But we've not seen any impact. There ought to be some impact on the lives and livelihoods of people whose lands and rivers were impacted by this oil." In a scathing review of the Ogoniland cleanup efforts, led by the Hydrocarbon Pollution Remediation Project, or Hyprep, the UN body paints a picture of rampant mismanagement, incompetence, waste and lack of transparency. It highlights the haphazard storage of oil-soaked soil that lets chemicals seep into uncontaminated grounds and creeks, contracts awarded to firms with little environmental-cleanup experience and proposals for millions of dollars in unneeded work.
Oh wow (Score:4, Insightful)
Re: Oh wow (Score:5, Informative)
Hyprep is being run by the UN and various government organizations. Big Oil's contribution was to throw money at it and then wash their hands of the matter.
Re: Oh wow (Score:4, Insightful)
Re: Oh wow (Score:4, Informative)
Hyprep is being run by the UN
Completely false, it is run by the Nigerian Federal Ministry of Environment. The UN's involvement is political and oversight, not operational. In other words, it is because of the monitoring by the UN that we know about the problems. From the summary:
the UN body paints a picture of rampant mismanagement, incompetence, waste and lack of transparency
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Completely false, it is run by the Nigerian Federal Ministry of Environment.
So that is why Nigerians keep contacting me in attempts to give me money. And now we know the rest of the story.
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Now now! Don't ignore local corruption skimming off the top and doing shitty jobs when they actually get to work, the difference being skimmed.
Re:Oh wow (Score:5, Informative)
Big oil being a gigantic pile of dicks. This is something new.
This actually has zero to do with big oil and everything to do with illegal oil / tiny oil. Shell's name is largely all over the pipelines that leaked, but those "leaks" are not the result of typical neglect but rather nicely cut holes as the illegal side industry taps pipelines and sets up whole "refineries" in an effort to profit heavily from an illegal diesel trade.
I use refineries in quotes as they are largely a giant drum in which they pour crude and light a fire underneath, they capture diesel off the top, and what's left in the drum after they shovel under the drum to use as fuel for the next batch. The "diesel" is naturally of incredibly horrible quality.
Better still is the government crackdown on the trade, sending military in to destroy these refineries and arrest those who were tapping the pipelines. Note my use of the words destroy and arrest. At no point do their repair any leaks and their efforts to destroy refineries range from hitting them with missiles, to shooting holes in the vessels they use and cutting holes into the drums they use for transport. Full or empty. All that crude and diesel then just gets spilled into the Niger Delta.
There's a good documentary on youtube about illegal refining in the the Niger Delta. They follow one of these military units into a village who bought the illegal diesel. They test it (which was pouring it into a glass to see how clear it is), and when they determined it was an illegal product they just fucked up the storage vessel and walk away leaving villagers who depend on the local environment for food to stare at the spilled diesel washing down into their waterways.
It's fucked up at all levels, corporate, government, and criminal. "Big Oil" ended up pulling out completely as even they were unable to control the situation. It's no surprise that the UN / government were unable to fix a problem they played such a large part in creating.
Rapid progress, revised (Score:4, Interesting)
It was in large part a mirage all along.
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Brlll bloopde shallalala, Lalaptchuuuuk klu klu pan thuma ki. Zopuu kitasak.
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Oh! Oh! I know this! This is perl, right?
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Indeed. And a lot of people thought getting rich on making things a bit worse was entirely fine, since things were looking to great. Well, the future looks pretty bad now as a result.
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Back then the top tax rate for 90%, and the super rich were paying an effective rate over 70%. Had that continued, some of those things like decent pensions might have panned out.
Somehow when they say MAGA I don't think that's what they are referring to.
What a crock (Score:4, Interesting)
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So the company that fucked over the area is paying itself to clean up the mess? Can't possibly imagine a conflict of interest there.
Not really. Shell is just throwing money at the problem after years of lawsuits. They don't actually do anything.
One of the bigger issues is the government itself, they largely are to blame for the problem in the first place. Those Shell "leaks" aren't so much leaks as they were illegal taps in the pipelines. Lots of illegal "refineries" stealing crude, processing it in fucking horrible ways https://www.theatlantic.com/ph... [theatlantic.com].
And the government response? Send in the military to destroy everything. There's so
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I appreciate the clarification. Obviously from my chair in Minnesota I don't have a lot of insight into what's going on in Nigeria. (Other than their Princes seem to be hell-bent on sending me untold fortunes, once I give them an Amazon gift card.) I still think having anyone from Shell involved in the cleanup, beyond writing checks, has astoundingly bad optics.
As for the rest of it, with the military/gov't compounding the problem, that is excellent insight. Thank you. Looking at some of those pics, the
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I still think having anyone from Shell involved in the cleanup, beyond writing checks, has astoundingly bad optics.
Yes and no, but I don't think they were given the option of walking away. Shell fought a legal battle for years about not wanting to have anything to do with this and lost. It stands to reason that if they are handing over money that someone will be watching.
You'd think burying them would help the issue a little bit.
It's a double edged sword. Burying anything makes maintenance a shitshow, and doesn't stop a dedicated thief. A PCK terminal near the polish border found that out one day when a farmer's field caught fire. Seems in the middle of the night some thieves i
hoping it would "set the standard" (Score:2, Informative)
Well, it certainly did, didn't it? Just like Chevron [theguardian.com] did in the Amazon
"Cleanups" aren't feasible (Score:3)
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Cleanups aren't feasible. Please prove me wrong: Show me any oil disaster area that has been restored to its original, pre-disaster condition. All oil companies do is pretend that cleaups are a thing. They're not. The rest of the oil, tar, bitumen, gas & coal needs to stay where it is. We've been shown again & again that we can't trust these companies & that they're destroying our life-support system. Why haven't we learned?
Take some time to actually go look in person at the ocean channel off of Santa Barbara, California. That area suffered a bad oil spill in 1969. 80,000 to 100,000 barels of oil spilled into the channel.
It looks beautiful now. Fisherman fish in that channel. Scuba divers dive in that channel. Ocean drilling rigs still extract oil & gas from the aging oil fields.
I don't know who actually cleaned it up, but it is clean now. Go see for yourself.
No signs of any complaints from enviros in the local news about
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Yeah? Never mind the channel. Go walk in person on the beaches in Santa Barbara, California. But maybe don't walk on those beaches barefoot; because all those black blobs you'll see are tar balls, and not the .tgz kind. To this day Santa Barbara, Los Angeles, Orange, and San Diego counties all have beach tar in amounts you do not see further up the coast. Because the prevailing ocean currents go south off California's coast, it gets cleaner the further south you go. But, tellingly, it starts in Santa
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If you go to the local museum in Santa Barbara and learn about the local indigenous Indians (been there & done that) you might learn that tar blobs have been found on those beaches, especially down in Carpenteria, going back to the days when only those Indians lived in the area. They found very practical uses for those tar blobs.
It is a natural geological phenomena on most of the beaches around Santa Barbara & Carpenteria. As for those other Counties I would not know their local histories going back
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All oil companies do is pretend that cleaups are a thing.
This isn't an oil company doing anything. It's a government, one that largely caused the problem in the first place.
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