Visible from space, deadly on Earth: the gas flares of Nigeria
Shell's activities in the West African country are under scrutiny
There is an ominous new arrival in the tropical forest outside Yenagoa in the southern Nigerian state of Bayelsa. It travels on black metal stilts above the green canopy before sinking into a concrete bunker where, when the bulldozers and cranes have finished work, millions of cubic feet of natural gas will be pumped before going up in smoke.
Shell's Opolo-Epie facility is the newest gas flare in the Niger Delta. And it gives the lie to claims from oil multinationals and the Nigerian government that they are close to bringing an end to the destructive and wasteful practice of gas flaring.
"This is environmental racism," said Alagoa Morris, an investigator with a local group, Environmental Rights Action, who regularly risks arrest to monitor activities at the heavily guarded oil and gas installations. "What we are asking for is that oil companies should have to meet the same standards in Nigeria that they do operating in their own countries."
The Opolo-Epie plant is set to join at least 100 other flares burning across the swamps, creeks and forests of this oil-producing region, filling the atmosphere with toxins, seeding the clouds with acid rain and polluting the soil.
The gas flares, some of which have been burning constantly since the 1960s, are visible from space. In a country where more than 60 per cent of the people have no reliable electricity supply, the satellite images show the flares burning more brightly than the lights of Nigeria's biggest city, Lagos.
Medical studies have shown the gas burners contribute to an average life expectancy in the Delta region of 43 years. The area also has Nigeria's highest infant mortality rate – 12 per cent of newborns fail to see out their first year.
The process of burning off unwanted "associated gas" brought up when oil is pumped out of the ground has been illegal in Nigeria since 1984. The government has set three separate deadlines for stopping the practice – the latest of which falls due at the end of this year – but still it continues.
While Nigerian officials are claiming record reductions in the amount of gas flared, independent oil and gas experts believe flaring is, in fact, reaching historic highs. Many observers attribute last year's much-trumpeted reduction to militancy in the Niger Delta which halved oil production.
"There is an obvious correlation between militancy, reduced oil production and reduced flaring," explained Joseph Hurstcroft, executive director of Stakeholder Democracy Network, a respected rights group working in the region. "The figures in the Delta are never clear but we are expecting to see an increase in flaring now that production is back up."
The Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation (NNPC) claims to have reduced flaring to 1.9 billion standard cubic feet (bscf) per day, or 30 per cent of total production. But a confidential report by international energy consultants, seen by The Independent, puts the figure at 2.5 bscf, or 40 per cent of total production.
The scale of the waste is staggering. If put through a modern, combined-cycle power station, this quantity of natural gas could fuel about a quarter of Britain's power needs. It is equivalent to more than one third of the natural gas produced in the UK's North Sea oil and gas fields and would meet the entire energy requirements of German industry.
The pollution generated from this flaring has been measured at up to 50 million tonnes of carbon dioxide, with unknown quantities of the far more damaging greenhouse gas: methane.
What is going on in the Niger Delta is a "continuing economic, political and environmental disaster", according to Chris Cragg, an independent oil and gas expert. "It is one of the largest single pointless emissions of greenhouse gas on the planet, with obvious implications for climate change that will not only affect Nigeria, but also the rest of the world."
Nigeria boasts some of the largest reserves of sweet and easily refined crude oil anywhere on the planet. Despite the scale of its oil stocks, it has far larger amounts of gas and is sometimes described as a gas province with some oil attached. Historically, it was the high-value crude which drew companies to the swampy Niger Delta in the 1950s when no one was interested in natural gas. While other countries have since created markets and infrastructure to utilise the gas, Nigeria has lagged behind, with successive governments content to impose largely meaningless fines on an industry that provides 80 per cent of the nation's income and more than 90 per cent of its export earnings.
Oil companies such as Shell, Exxon, Chevron and Agip argue that the absence of a domestic market, the imposition of price controls and the high cost of building infrastructure to capture and distribute natural gas have made it economically unviable to end flaring. They complain that they are forced to operate as minority partners in joint ventures with the NNPC, which consistently fails to provide its share of investment. The Nigerian government, which has a bill going through the Senate demanding an end to gas flaring at all facilities by 31 December, has in turn blamed the oil majors.
"You will never completely eliminate flaring," said Bent Svensson, of the global gas flaring reduction unit at the World Bank. He said the best that could be hoped for was the elimination of "continuous flaring" – the most damaging way to dispose of associated gas. "That is at least four years away and that assumes everything goes according to plan, and there have been plans and deadlines before," he added.
Shell told The Independent it had spent $3bn since 2001 on a "flares-down" investment programme and insisted that any new plants, including Opolo-Epie, used flares only for safety reasons. However, the company made an identical spending claim in a public report more than three years ago, suggesting it has either spent nothing in the last three years or that it overstated the level of that investment.
"The companies are not serious at all about ending flaring," said Nnimmo Bassey, a Nigerian environmental activist who chairs Friends of the Earth International. "They will never stop gas flaring until the oil wells run dry."
WHAT IS GAS FLARING?
*Geology dictates that some of the richest deposits of oil sit together with deposits of natural gas. Gas flaring is the practice of burning off that natural gas when it is brought to the surface in places where there is no infrastructure to make use of it. In the 1960s and 70s, "worthless" gas was continuously flared at oil wells from Texas to Saudi Arabia. At its peak, the practice pumped about 110 million metric tonnes of carbon dioxide to the atmosphere each year — about 0.5 per cent of the world's carbon dioxide emissions.
Since then, the practice has been reduced, largely because companies have realised the commercial potential of the gas. Pressure to reduce flaring increased again when negative impacts of burning the gas became better understood and efforts began to reduce the CO2 emissions driving climate change. However, flaring is commonplace in Nigeria, where an estimated 40 per cent of gas produced is burned off – about 2.5 billion standard cubic feet per day. Worldwide, the gas lost to flaring could meet one third of the EU's natural gas needs each year.
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Comments
in this action for at least half a century now.
"The flares pump 400 million tons of CO2 annually into
the atmosphere. 13% of the gas flared in the world comes from Nigeria alone
and stands at about 23 billion cubic meters per year. This quantity is enough
to meet Nigeria�s energy needs and leave a healthy balance for export. Through this obnoxious act; the country has lost about $72 billion in revenues for the period 1970-2006 or about $2.5
billion annually.3 All these go up in smoke yearly, leaving death and
destruction in its path ". N. Bassey.
Quoting from yet another article: "The biggest need for that gas is in Nigeria. Nigeria is in the grip of a power generation crisis and the gas that is being burned could go a long way towards providing the electricity the country desperately needs in order to develop its economy". (http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/afric
Some key points:
Doctors have reported higher rates of cancer, children with asthma and a suggestion the burning gasses may be making residents infertile.
Royal Dutch Shell, the largest operator of onshore wells, has not commented on the claims that gas flaring affects the health of local residents.
Flaring takes place from thousands of well heads in an area the size of Britain.
About 40% of Nigeria's gas is flared as it is produced.
All boils down to bad governance and greedy oil companies.
http://greenexplorer.ovi.com/getinspire
All that matters to them is profit
Not a word about the people who live in this vast delta. They have survived for centuries on the habitable marsh-like lands devising unique cultures rich in oral traditions. How do the Ogoni and others benefit from the vast oil and gas reserves?
Are Delta children dying of asthma and cancer so we can use THEIR petrol in OUR cars and power plants?
These questions should be asked and, until answered, boycotts of all known Shell products initiated.
But surely it makes economic AND environmental sense to bleed off the gas, pipeline or container it away for domestic or export use, into plants that can clean up the emissions from this, thus removing the harmful aspect from the local community.
Perhaps they are doing it on purpose, cheap energy would thus enable Nigeria to develop itself into a higher industrial nation, thus empowering it and making it more self sufficient, a land wasted by toxins, a populace kept poor and dying is far more what the corporations would like to see as they can't be too choosy on the deals they are offered.
It seriously does not make any sense in this day and age to burn off this huge amount of energy to little use.
Nothing new, Algeria & Libya been doing it for decades.
Is it a moronic brute that lets these oil companies do this, or is it that oil companies are run by brutal morons?
The inventions that can save our planet are being suppressed.
sadly it's all under the table payments, killing people who try to stop the damage (Ken saro-wiwa?), blatant lies about going green (BP?) and massive 'donations' to political parties to turn a blind eye to what's going on.
Welcome to capitalism.
Is the �developed� world�s governmental drive to restrict citizen�s movement and avoid building the additional road networks that are so badly needed (and without which millions of tons of fuel are needlessly wasted every day in traffic jams) etc. etc., merely another aspect of control freakery when the wholesale atmospheric pollution by mega-business is allowed to continue and increase?
The �every little helps� drive to enforce the switch to dim light bulbs and increasingly draconian penalties for not following the mind boggling regime of recycling would appear to be paying lip service to "environmentalism" when the sky over China and Nigeria (and a host of other countries) is increasingly black with real pollution (NOT CO2, which as many people know is the stuff of life for plants and is at a historically low/moderate level on a geological time scale) and the seas and oceans (still the Earth's principal source of oxygen production) are increasingly polluted by any manner of toxic waste in a wanton and uncontrolled way.
Do our politicians think we are so na�ve as to believe they are �addressing the problem� by beating up �their� citizens for miniscule effect to the environment (but increasing erosion of liberty to the individual) while putting the really effective global action in the �too difficult to try� file�?
In Africa esp. Nigeria. And there was Trafigura in the Ivory Coast dumping toxic waste on the local population.
In the Niger Delta, oil has done nothing for the people there. Most are still living in poverty amidst an environmental disaster.
The Governments are corrupt but the oil companies are complicit and control everything globally including Governments.
In the 'developed' world it's called lobbying and even induce governments to go to war (Iraq, Afghanistan). In the developing world it's called bribery and corruption by paying off local and national leaders as in Nigeria.
The assertion at the start of the article of "flares burning... filling the atmosphere with toxins, seeding the clouds with acid rain and polluting the soil" is not supported by any subsequent evidence whatever, so we may take it as being pure journalistic puffery.
True, a lot of energy in this methane is being wasted, which is bad. One supposes that this would offer a great opportunity in Nigeria for some company to exploit the methane to produce power and sell it locally. But this is not the responsibility of the extractors. Actually Africa is full of great opportunities that are not exploited, for various obvious reasons. Since Nigeria cannot even refine enough gasoline and diesel for local requirements, there is no reason to think that any step change in efficiency will occur any time soon.
Putting the infrastructure in for capturing the gas and sending it to foreign markets is a very costly business indeed, and I am sure the companies know their own business best, when they decline to make the investment.
By the way, shipping natural gas to another country for consumption is not practicable (as it is for propane and butane). Realistically, it can only be transported by pipeline. So this methane must be used locally (which they don't seem capable of doing) or not at all. If it is not to be used productively, obviously it is better to flare it off than just to release it, at least from the greenhouse-gas point of view (if you believe that).
I realise that your belief in profit at all/any cost is going to make this impossible to comprehend but there are many people - the majority here in fact - that would agree that the of raiding another country in order to plunder the resources without any thought or care is the work of a criminal. You are, no doubt, quick to defend the oil companies as merely working at the behest of a small number of corrupt criminals in government, but you fail to grasp that if there was no oil company willing to raid and plunder there would be no problem. Yes, of course it isn't going to be a profitable enterprise for the oil companies to make some use of the gas - but that is because the technology to make the best use of the full 'product' has not yet been developed. Why not wait? What is the rush to extract the oil and damn the consequences?
I might remind you, also, that the gas currently being flared off is not just methane. Read the article again - with open eyes and a receptive (non-Tory) mind this time.
"By the way, shipping natural gas to another country for consumption is not practicable (as it is for propane and butane)"
,,,and just where do you think propane, butane, pentane come form? They're part of the "natural gas" that provides the pressure to force oil out of the ground.
I worked at the first NGL (Jubail Berri Natural Gas Liquids) plant built in Saudi Arabia in 1978. It was prefabbed by Flour in San Diego, California, every piece numbered. The plant was tested, then reduced to its constituent components and shipped to Arabia, where it was loaded on flat bed trucks and transported into the desert, where it was re-assembled. Since there was no connection to the electrical net, the plant was first started by running "raw" natural gas to one of three Westinghouse 501D gas turbo generators. Once the plant was up and distilling and liquifying the gas, the purified gas was then routed to the remaining two turbo generators while the first had its' turbine blades replaced. This was necessary because Saudi natural gas has a lot of sulphur, which when burned, produces sulphuric acid that etched the turbine blades.
Today, Saudi Arabia is one of the largest exporters of Liquified NAtural gas on earth. I see no reason, other than short sighted money grubbing, the same could not be done in Nigeria.
Of course, as gas pressures fall, oil recovery will decline. Perhaps they should just pump the gas back into the wells.
Saudi Arabia hasn't flared gas(other than in an emergency, such as when the NGL plant goes down) in over 20 years.
That's progress.
Gary 7
And how do you work that out anyway? It's greed that causes all this natural gas evolved from the wells in Nigeria to be thrown away, burnt? How would that satisfy greed? Are you saying that it would be an overall loss-maker to catch it and bottle for export the portion that can be liquefied and sell the remainder by pipeline to local industry? Surely the problem is lack of greed! Or rather - and this is my analysis - simply lack of local organization, and inertia.
Berri NGL plant probably cost about a billion dollars to build. For the Saudi arabs, it was obviously just an investment in an upstream profit generator. Of course, they had an imperative to maximize their total long term return but it was some western expert that pointed this out to them. Once the longer term profit capability was delineated, the Saudi Royal family ran with the ball.
GAry 7
In the late 1970's Shell Expro was ordered by the UK by the UK Government to stop flaring gas as a normal operation from all UK offshore installations. Failure to comply would have meant a compulsory shut down down of production operations. Gas processing and export/injection facilities and export pipelines were installed on each facility Each installation was given a flaring consent for a set volume of gas to account for plant start-up and emergencies when gas flaring is unavoidable. I cannot help wondering why the Government of Nigeria does not make the same restriction on Shell. Someone more cynical than I might just conclude some some very large brown envelopes have been been delivered by Shell to Nigerian Oil Ministers
True, Gordon123 - from which police and military oppression is financed and maintained. The Ogoni have not been taking this lying down (well said, Ambricourt). This is ecocide in action.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentis
A talk on 'drilling and killing' by Oronto Douglas, former attorney to Ken Saro Wiwa...
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bEhhiKJD
With masses of energy been uncontrollably burned (I don't buy the ratman and thomadgoodey lines at all), the least unpalatable line of defence left for the planet would appear to be if the Delta militants succeeded in making extraction impossible.
Marlijn, Friends of the Earth Netherlands
Do we really treat the oil as a talent?
Do we really know that as in the biblical distribution of talent - we will be asked (individually and collectively) to give account.?
An Apology will not be accepted by the GIVER
BabaD