/ 24 December 2011

Offshore Nigeria spill came amid tanker-loading

A faulty pipe from an offshore oil field run by Royal Dutch Shell PLC near Nigeria's coast spewed crude oil into the ocean for as much as 25 hours.

A faulty pipe from an offshore oil field run by Royal Dutch Shell PLC near Nigeria’s coast spewed crude oil into the ocean for as much as 25 hours as workers loaded a waiting tanker, the company acknowledged on Friday.

While Shell continues to investigate the cause of what likely is the worst offshore spill in more than a decade near oil-rich Nigeria, the nation’s beleaguered government remains largely reliant on the oil firm to clean up the spill.

While the huge slick remains offshore, it still poses a danger to wildlife and plants in a region where spills already stain the environment.

The spill occurred at the Bonga offshore oil field, 120km off Nigeria’s coast.

The field, which Shell operates in partnership with Italy’s Eni SpA, Exxon Mobil, France’s Total SA and the state-run Nigerian National Petroleum, is controlled from a large ship as opposed to a stationary rig.

Information released by Shell shows workers discovered the spill on Tuesday as they tried to fill a waiting tanker with crude oil.

Loading tankers takes roughly 25 hours, meaning the spill could have begun at any time during the process.

A London-based spokesperson for Shell declined to comment on specifics about the spill, saying a company is still investigating the cause.

The company did release an underwater image of the 48-centimeter pipeline that caused the leak, which showed a rupture along it.

Shell said the leak on the pipe has been plugged and that less than 40 000 barrels of oil has spilled into the Atlantic Ocean. That likely represents the biggest offshore spill near Nigeria since 1998, when roughly the same amount of oil poured out of a Mobil offshore field, sending oil slicks as far as the country’s commercial capital of Lagos.

The Bonga field produces about 200 000 barrels of oil a day and represents about 10% of production in Africa’s most populous nation.

Shell has said it shut down the field and has offered no estimate of when production could resume at a field vital to Nigeria’s government finances.

An independent watchdog group called SkyTruth suggests the spill could stretch across roughly 920 square kilometers of ocean. Shell has said it is using helicopters and ships to monitor the slick and have used chemical dispersants on it.

Peter Idabor, who leads the National Oil Spill Detection and Response Agency, said the oil had yet to reach the coast on Friday afternoon. He declined to comment further, but federal lawmakers have already criticised the agency for not having the equipment in place to deal with such a disaster.

The agency has “to now rely almost exclusively on the grace and benevolence of the oil companies, in this case Shell, to provide them logistics, equipment and [an] information command and control centre,” Senator Abubakar Bukola Saraki said in a statement.

The publicised spill comes as Nigeria experiences others daily in its oil-rich Niger Delta, a maze of creeks and mangroves roughly the size of Portugal.

Since Shell began production there about 50 years ago, environmentalists say as much as 550 million gallons of oil poured into the delta during that time — a rate roughly comparable to one Exxon Valdez disaster per year.

While oil routinely laps up against shorelines and leaves a tub-like ring, the size of the Bonga spill could affect beaches typically untouched by the country’s oil trade.

The oil could kill plants like mangroves, palms and shrubs, as well as poison the fish the region depends on for food and trade.

Shell in recent years has said most of the spills in the delta are caused by militant attacks or thieves tapping into pipelines to steal crude oil, which ends up sold into the black market or cooked into a crude diesel or kerosene.

Company statistics kept by Shell show spills have dropped as militant attacks in the region subsided, though this single spill at Bonga roughly doubles the amount of oil spilled by Shell this year.

Nigeria, an OPEC member nation producing about 2.4-million barrels of crude oil a day, is a top supplier to the US. — Sapa-AP