Last month, Shell finalized the sale of two billion, four hundred million dollars in onshore and shallow-water assets in Nigeria, bringing an end to the oil giant’s operations in the country’s onshore oil and gas sector, without taking responsibility for properly clearing up the 1,010 oil spills since 2011, or the 491,627 barrels of oil spilled from 1998 to 2009.
In March, the United States government ordered Chevron to close down its oil operations in Venezuela, winding down a business that exported almost 250,000 barrels of crude per day, with Chevron going to abandon the clean up of some of the 46,000 oil spills in that country between 2010 and 2016.
In 1992, the Ecuadorian government finally purchased Texaco’s oil business, bringing an end to an operation that began in 1964, with Texaco (bought by Chevron) not clearing up the large amount of toxic water dumped into the Amazon, estimated at 18.5 billion gallons in 28 years.
When big oil companies sell their business, they abandon cleaning up the oil spills from their operations, leaving behind environmental degradation of gargantuan proportions, endangering marine and terrestrial ecosystems for generations in the future.
Nigeria requires about $12 billion over a 12-year period to clean up decades of oil spills for just one out of nine oil producing states, while a Dutch court found Shell liable for oil pollution between 2004 and 2007, ordering the company to pay $16 million in compensation to Nigerian farmers.
Ecuador requires tens of billions of dollars to clean up the environmental degradation from oil spills by Chevron, which has been ordered to pay
$9.5 billion to thousands of residents in Ecuador’s Amazon region.
Venezuela also requires billions of dollars to clean up oil spills from decades of operations by oil companies such as Chevron, which might end up not taking any responsibility for destroying the lives of thousands of people if forced to live.
Oil giants either sell their business, or are happy to leave a country where they operate, to avoid taking responsibility for oil spills from their work, due to the huge costs involved, amounts running into billions of dollars.
In Nigeria, oil spills from Shell and others destroyed an estimated five to ten percent of the mangrove ecosystems, impacted negatively on about 7,400 square kilometers of rainforest, and affected at least 1,500 communities in nine crude oil producing states in the country.
In Ecuador, over 4,676 oil spills by oil companies have affected various ecosystems, bringing a total of 3,568 recorded cases of contamination, polluting rivers, beaches, mangrove forests, and large swathes of agricultural land.
In Venezuela, 50,000 oil spill incidents took place between 2010 and 2016, damaging ecosystems in Lake Maracaibo, one of the largest lakes in South America and host to a diverse range of species.
Apart from the destruction to various ecosystems, oil spills exacerbate climate change, because they release toxic fumes that impact the atmosphere and contribute to greenhouse gas emissions.
Strict regulations, environmental impact assessments, transparency and decommissioning plans should be followed when oil companies decide to make exits, or local communities will suffer from the effects of their presence for many generations.
By Adetokunbo Abiola
