By IPS Correspondents
LAGOS, Apr 6 1996 (IPS)

The oil giant Mobil is having to review an 800 million dollar natural gas project it is undertaking in Nigeria following protests by a local community that the full environmental consequences of the scheme were not taken into account before work commenced last year.

The Finima community in Bonny, a major oil export terminal on the southern most tip of the Niger Delta coast, reported Mobil to the Federal Environmental Protection Agency (FEPA), alleging that Mobil — the second largest producer in Nigeria after Shell — was devastating their land.

Consequently, the director of the agency, Dr Evans Aina, led a team of FEPA officials to Finima on Feb. 28 to investigate the allegations and found “various shortcomings”.

Under the 1992 law establishing the agency, all major projects must undergo an environmental impact assessment (EIA) and win FEPA’s approval before take-off.

However, Mobil commenced construction work at the project site in March last year after conducting an environmental impact assessment but without seeking the approval of FEPA.

“Mobil will not be sanctioned for starting the project without FEPA’s environmental impact assessment,” said Aina, “but its (own) EIA report will have to be reviewed and up-dated. The report is a little bit short of the standard we normally accept.”

FEPA’s reason for not sanctioning Mobil is that the company has “a good record of environmental consciousness”. Perhaps a more persuasive point is the fact that apart from FEPA being a government agency, the natural gas recovery project in question is a joint venture between Mobil (51 percent) and the state-owned Nigeria National Petroleum Corporation (49 percent).

For the Finima community however, the effects of the shortcomings in Mobil’s EIA that Aina’s team discovered translate into much more than “a little bit”.

FEPA found that the project has caused the blockage of a major creek running through the community. This fact is not mentioned at all in Mobil’s environmental impact assessment.

The consequences of the blockage include a change in the regular tidal flushing on the sea shore, which has brought death to a patch of mangrove forest covering about two acres near the project site. Also imperilled are periwinkles, fish and several mangrove organisms.

This latest development appears to lend credence to allegations that poor environmental practices by oil companies operating in the Niger Delta, the main oil producing area covering over 70,000 square kms and home to some seven million people, is threatening one of the world’s largest mangrove swamps.

Mobil, however, is not without its excuses. According to Femi Olagbenle, the company’s environment and loss prevention manager, its environmental impact report was approved by a relevant government body, the Department of Petroleum Resources in the Ministry of Petroleum.

Now that FEPA has intervened it has set additional environmental safeguards. They include collecting data on the vegetation surrounding the project area for a broader impact assessment; description of technology being used by the plant in order to determine its suitability; and providing details of contingency measures in case of emergencies.

The project is also coming under the scrutiny of a new body, the Niger Delta Environmental Survey (NDES), set up in February last year to evaluate the extent of ecological degradation inflicted on the Niger Delta.

Although supposedly an independent body, its credibility is questioned by the fact that it was initiated and is being funded by Shell on behalf of its joint venture partners including Agip, Elf, Chevron and the Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation.

Prof Claude Ake, a respected social scientist who was a member of the NDES, resigned last November after the execution of nine Ogoni environmental and minority rights activists found guilty of murder by military tribunals. Since 1990, the Ogonis have been campaigning against Shell’s operations which they allege have severely devastated their land after three decades of oil exploitation.

Nonetheless, NDES remains an influential body, and according to its chairman, Gamaliel Onosode, a respected technocrat, “the collection of data, even the interpretation of data, will be done in co-operation with the communities themselves.”

While its findings, unlike FEPA’s, are not binding, Onosode believes they will “commend themselves…purely by the quality of those findings; it is only the respect the NDES enjoys, the influence it can wield by virtue of its objectivity, that will compel stakeholders to act in conformity with our findings.”

Meanwhile, the Finima community, through its representative, Reginald Ayi-Brown, has presented Mobil with a fairly long shopping list of compensation demands. They include the establishment of an ecological fund for the community, provision of deep sea fishing facilities as well as schools and clinics.

Mobil had hoped that the 20 million naira (2.6 million dollars) it paid in 1992 as compensation for damaged crops would be enough.

Ironically, the natural gas liquids recovery project is aimed at reducing environmental damage caused by the flaring of gas occurring in the course of oil production, as well as making large amounts of money for Mobil and NNPC.

Under the project, gas from 19 oil fields will be collected at Oso on the Niger Delta coast — where Mobil already has a condensate plant — and transported 65 kms southwest by pipeline to the Bonny terminal.

There it will be fractionalised into different gases, including butane, propane and pentane plus, and stored for export.

On completion in December 1997, the plant is expected to process 600 million standard cubic feet of gas per stream day, making it a highly efficient facility. Bonny, which was a major export terminal for slaves during the trans-Atlantic trade, will now be shipping natural gas to clients in Europe and North America.

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