Shell Nigeria oil spill '60 times bigger than it claimed'

[Eugene]

Source: The Guardian

Shell Nigeria oil spill '60 times bigger than it claimed'

As the company faces a lawsuit by residents, an assessment by a
US oil spill consultancy casts doubt on Shell's estimate of the
Nigerian leak

John Vidal
guardian.co.uk, Monday 23 April 2012 17.46 BST

A Shell oil spill on the Niger delta was at least 60 times greater than the company reported at the time, according to unpublished documents obtained by Amnesty International.

According to Shell, the 2008 spill from a faulty weld on a pipeline resulted in 1,640 barrels of oil being spilt into the creeks near the town of Bodo in Ogoniland. The figure was based on an assessment agreed at the time by the company, the government oil spill agency, the Nigerian oil regulator and a representative of the community.

But a previously unpublished assessment, carried out by independent US oil spill consultancy firm Accufacts, suggests that between 103,000 barrels and 311,000 barrels of oil were flooding into the Bodo creeks every day for as long as 72 days following the leak. Accufacts arrived at the figure following analysis of video footage of the leak taken at the time by local people. This suggested that between one and three barrels of oil were leaking every minute. A similar method was used by spill assessors to gauge the scale of the BP Deepwater spill underwater in the gulf of Mexico in 2010.

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Read more: http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2012/apr/23/shell-nigeria-oil-spill-bigger

[PDJane]

1. It seems to me that these companies....shell, bp, etc....

Do as much damage to the environment from spills and accidental discharges as they reap in benefits, and should be held to account for it.

This is a finite resource they are spilling all over the damn place, and they should be held to account for that, too.

[kristopher]

2. Here's the picture that goes with the article.

Several years on ... fishing boats lie abandoned in oil-polluted water near Bodo, Nigeria. Photograph: Pius Utomi Ekpei/AFP/Getty