Making profits while gas continues to flare

Nnimmo Bassey claims that in Nigeria the authorities’ efforts to curb gas flaring are being thwarted by the big oil companies.

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A Shell gas flare in Iwhrekan, Nigeria. Photo: Kadir van Lohuizen/NOOR. Photographer KADIR VAN LOHUIZEN has covered conflicts in Africa and elsewhere, but is probably best known for his long-term projects on seven of the world’s rivers and the diamond industry. He has received numerous prizes for his work, including two World Press Photo awards. In September 2007, he and ten others established the NOOR agency. He is based in Amsterdam, the Netherlands.

While the world dithers on actions to curb the release of greenhouse gases, oil companies in Nigeria are busy pumping the gases into the atmosphere through gas flaring, and they are reaping huge profits as they do so. This is happening even though gas flaring in Nigeria was confirmed unconstitutional and an abuse of human rights by a High Court in November 2005.

Communities living in the oil fields of Nigeria have been complaining about human rights abuses related to gas flaring for over five decades. Indeed, the act of routine gas flaring was outlawed in Nigeria in 1984, when a law on gas re-injection came into effect. From that date, oil companies were prohibited from engaging in routine gas flaring and could only flare with a special permit from the responsible minister. They would also pay a fine. However, these measures proved to be insufficient.

In 1984, the fine was a mere US$0.003 (0.3 cents) per 28,300 cubic metres of gas flared. It increased in 1988 to US$0.07 per 28,300 cubic metres, and in January 2008 to US$3.50 for every 28..3 cubic metres.

Since the restoration of democratic politics in Nigeria in 1999, successive administrations set many final dates for the halting of gas flaring – with none being honoured. Gas flaring was supposed to end in 2007, 2008 and 2010!

The Nigerian National Assembly also attempted proposing a new deadline of 2012 when the Senate passed a bill that effectively criminalized it, and raised the levels of punishment and fines in an attempt to make the fine equal to the commercial value of the gas being flared. According to some observers, that bill failed to see the light of the day, due partly to heavy industry pressure.

Public relations
Claims by oil companies that they are working to reduce gas flaring are best seen in the context of public relations. The reality is that these companies are busy raising hurdles in the path of halting the criminal activity, and this is obvious in two key ways.

Firstly, Shell, ExxonMobil and Chevron are said to be deliberately frustrating government efforts to install real-time measurement equipment at 166 gas points which would accurately measure the amount of gas being produced in the country. According to the Nigeria’s Directorate of Petroleum Resources, the measuring equipment has been installed at only ten out of the 166 points. This posture compounds the lack of transparency in the Nigerian oil and gas sector, where the true amount of crude oil extracted in the oilfields remains a mystery.

More power plants will have come on-stream by now, but gas-to-power investors complain that the flaring oil majors have generally refused to cooperate with them,
denying them access to the gas that is currently being flared. In fact, three years after thirteen companies were prequalified by the Nigerian government to gain access to and harness gas from 180 identified onshore and offshore flare sites, the oil companies have not granted these companies the access they need.

Secondly, they are vigorously resisting the moves by the government to bring in a Petroleum Industry Bill (PIB) that would demand more transparency, as well as more socio-economic justice in oil and gas sector operations. By the close of Parliament in May 2011, there were seven versions of the PIB in circulation because of intense pressure from those with vested interests. In fact, there was only one mention of gas flaring in the version of the PIB that civil society groups believed was likely to be passed into law at that time. Shockingly, the draft PIB said nothing about stopping gas flaring.

The World Bank states that gas flaring decreased in 2009 in Nigeria from 21.3 billion cubic metres to 15.2 billion cubic metres. However, one of the major offenders, the Shell Petroleum Development Company (Shell), admitted that their flares went up 33% in 2010 compared to their 2009 figure. This clearly shows that whatever may have
caused the decrease in 2009, it was not likely a result of the oil companies’ actions to curb the practice.

In front of a Shell gas flare in the Niger Delta.

New flares
Oil companies in Nigeria claim that gas flaring became standard industry practice from the onset of oil exploitation in Nigeria because of the lack of a market for the gas. There is a huge market now, but the companies are still lighting up new flares.

For example, Shell lit a new one at Opolo-Epie in 2010 (although this has been off for the last few months). They also lit another one at their Central Oil and Gas Processing Facility at Gbaran-Ubie in the same year. (Interestingly, an environmental evaluation study commissioned by Shell gave a dubious verdict, passing off gas flaring as having health and environmental benefits. For example, one of the findings of the evaluation was that the incidence of malaria in the area declined from 29.1% to 26% after their flare lit up the sky.)

AGIP, the Italian oil giant, commenced flaring at their location at Ondewari, Bayelsa State, in mid-2011. Like Shell’s flares at Oben and elsewhere, this flare is aligned horizontally at ground level at Ossiama Creek. The AGIP company employees work under heavy guard, mounted by the Nigerian Joint Military Taskforce, and community people passing by in canoes or boats are forced to keep their hands in the air whenever they are close to the location. Local people are humiliated, while oil companies and the Nigerian government continue to reap profits as gas flaring continues.

Flaring was recently stopped at somefacilities, for instance, at Shell’s facilities at Imiringi (Kolo Creek), Etelebou and JK4. In some cases, the flaring stopped due to gas-to-power plants coming on-stream in the Niger Delta. These gas-to-power plants are essential in an electricity-poor nation like Nigeria, but, overall, the flaring in the region remains massive. Shockingly, the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) recently started accepting gas-flare-to-power plants as Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) projects. For instance, an AGIP project at Kwale and a Pan Ocean project at the Ovade-Ogharefe oil fields in Delta State have been accepted.

CDM projects should fulfill an ‘additionality’ requirement (that is, the emissions of greenhouse gases should be reduced to less than would have occurred in the absence of the registered CDM project activity) but these gas-flare-to-power plants do not fulfil this requirement, as they are just partially halting an already illegal activity. Accepting gas-flare-to-power plants as registered CDM projects is unethical, and must be stopped.

Carbon reduction exaggerated
Several analysts believe that the carbon reduction claims made by oil companies are grossly exaggerated and that the power projects are aiming to utilize gas from gas
fields, rather than gas associated with crude oil extraction. The reason for this is that the gas associated with crude oil extraction is more expensive to harness than non-associated gas (from gas fields).

In recent years, some projects have been hyped as keys to halting, or at least massively reducing, gas flaring in the Niger Delta. An example of this is the West African Gas Pipeline project backed by the World Bank. The hype did not materialize. It is estimated that 80% of the gas conveyed by this pipeline is non-associated gas and only 20% is associated gas.

The world has been drunk on oil. The harm done by gas flaring to people living in the backwaters of the oil fields, and to the planet at large, must spur decision-makers
to stop this destructive practice. Even drunks are capable of just decisions during moments of sobriety.

● Nnimmo Bassey is a Nigerian environmentalist activist. In 1993, he co-founded Environmental Rights Action (ERA), a Nigerian advocacy non-governmental organization, to deal with environmental human rights issues in the country. In 2008, Bassey was elected Chair of Friends of the Earth International, the world’s largest grassroots environmental network.

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Impacts on health
Even in the absence of concrete localized scientific studies on this issue, there are studies in other countries with far less flaring than Nigeria which provide conclusive proof that flaring harms people and the ecosystem. The combustion of associated gas leads to the release of particulate matter, sulphur dioxide, nitrogen oxides and other substances such as benzene, toluene, xylene etc. which are known to cause cancers.

According to the United States Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), “many scientific studies have linked breathing particulate matter to a series of significant health problems including: aggravated asthma, increases in respiratory symptoms like coughing and difficult and painful breathing, chronic bronchitis, decreased lung function and premature death”. Furthermore, the EPA asserts that “it has been clearly established and accepted that exposure to benzene and its metabolites causes acute nonlymphocyte leukaemia and a variety of other blood related disorders”. (Environmental Rights Action)