Envisat ASAR image analyzed by SkyTruth (http://www.skytruth.org) - data courtesy European Space Agency

The Bonga oil field, one of Shell’s largest offshore oil facilities was shut down on Tuesday 20 December after a massive oil spill. The cause? It appears to be a combination of human error and / or equipment failure. What the BBC describes as “leak during a transfer of oil to a tanker” led to a reported 40,000 barrels of crude oil spilling into Nigerian waters.

Sattelite images show a clearly identifiable slick that measures 356 square miles. Digital scientists Sky Truth have published the shocking images which show an enormous mass of crude oil afloat in the Gulf of Guinea. [UPDATE 22 Dec: The AP reports that the oil spill is "moving to the coast" where it could impact heavily on local fishing communities.]

Skytruth also provided detailed measurements of the visible oil slick:

it is about 70 km (45 miles) long, 17 km (10 miles) wide at it’s widest, and covers 923 square kilometers (356 square miles) of ocean

This is a major spill, even by Shell Nigeria’s shocking standards. In August 2011, Shell was heavily condemned by the UN for failing to comply with basic industry measures and covering up the extent of the pollution in the Niger Delta. Fifty years of oil pollution could take up to 30 years to clean up, according to UNEP.

This latest spill casts serious doubt over the viability of Shell’s offshore drilling programme. Shell has held up Bonga and other “ultra-deepwater” facilities in Nigeria as being safe and secure operations that use cutting edge, clean technology. That a spill of this magnitude could occur despite the technology deployed shows that Shell’s deepwater drilling poses severe risks to the environment.

Deepwater drillling activity has expanded aggressively across the West African rim and poses substantial threats to the coastal environment. In more remote and inhospitable regions like the Arctic, where Shell and other companies are planning to drill next summer, the consequences of a deepwater spill could be even more catastrophic.

North Sea Troubles:

Earlier in August 2011, Shell was responsible for causing the worst oil spill in the area in the UK North Sea for over a decade. A leak in a pipe between an oil well and the Gannet Alpha offshore platform spilled 1,300 barrels of oil into the sea. Shell has yet to clear the remaining oil trapped inside the 4 kilometre subsea pipeline. The company may face a criminal prosecution following an investigation by the Department for Energy and Climate Change. Gannet Alpha is 113 miles (180km) off Aberdeen.

A damning investigation into rusty, ageing rigs in the North Sea by the Express newspaper revealed an appalling level of risk on board Shell’s oil platforms. Bill Campbell, ex-group auditor for Shell International and safety campaigner said:

data showed there were 85 gas releases and 443 dangerous occurrences last year. “The probability of an undesirable event is extremely high,” he said.

Watch the video by you and i films here:

The protest coincides with the 16th anniversary of the execution of writer and activist Ken Saro-Wiwa and eight other Ogoni activists for their campaign against the environmental and social devastation caused by Shell and the Nigerian military regime. In response to peaceful protests by the minority Ogoni people in Nigeria, Shell collaborated with the military in a series of brutal crackdowns in the 1990s that claimed the lives of thousands. In October 2011, Platform released a new report on Shell’s role in recent human rights abuses perpetrated by the Nigerian military. The report also reveals how Shell has fuelled conflict through payments to armed gangs in the Delta region.

Events like the Shell Live Wire are used by the company to dissociate itself from human rights abuses and environmental devastation that results from its activities in Nigeria and elsewhere. The protest in London seeks to challenge Shell’s “social licence to operate”, thereby weakening its ability to commit abuses with impunity. The protest was organised by London Rising Tide and according to Indymedia encountered limited resistance from security:

Centrepoint security at first overstepped the mark, pushing people and trying to snatch the banner, but they retreated indoors and closed off the entrance when they realised they were being filmed, allowing the protest to continue right outside.

Hundreds of leaflets were handed out to interested passers-by, and police, who arrived after around 40 minutes, waited for instruction up the command chain before deciding to leave the protest alone.

A new report today published by Amnesty International and the Centre for Environment, Human Rights and Development (CEHRD) has called on Shell to accept responsibility for the pollution caused by oil spills in the Niger Delta, and to begin by paying US$1 billion as an initial down-payment towards the clean-up.

The report highlights how Shell’s pollution has wrecked lives and livelihoods in the town of Bodo, Ogoni, which was home to 69,000 people. Shell had caused two major oil spills there in 2008-2009 which became  the subject of a UK lawsuit filed at the High Court in April. The company was forced to admit liability and could be made to pay up to $410 million in compensation and clean up the damage. Amnesty condemned the company’s response to the spills:

Shell – which recently reported profits of US$ 7.2bn billion for July-September 2011 – initially offered the Bodo community just 50 bags of rice, beans, sugar and tomatoes as relief for the disaster.

CEHRD’s Coordinator, Patrick Naagbanton said:

“The situation in Bodo is symptomatic of the wider situation in the Niger Delta oil industry. The authorities simply do not control the oil companies. Shell and other oil companies have the freedom to act – or fail to act – without fear of sanction. An independent, robust and well-resourced regulator is long overdue; otherwise even more people will continue to suffer at the hands of the oil companies.”

AI also acknowledged that the UK government’s proposed cuts to the legal aid budget could make the UK courts inaccessible to the victims of corporate human rights abuses, such as Shell’s in Nigeria:

This report reinforces the need for victims of the overseas operations of UK companies to have access to justice in the UK. This is now under threat because of provisions in the Government’s Legal Aid, Sentencing and Punishment of Offenders that would change the balance of costs against complainants bringing cases such as Bodo to the UK courts, and in favour of the multinational corporations defending such cases. If the Bill passes, such cases would no longer be viable.

Buying a copy of the report enables Platform to do more campaigning for human rights and corporate accountability in Nigeria. Your support is already having a real impact:

• In the last 10 days, over 13,900 of you signed a petition demanding that Shell is held accountable for its human rights abuses in Nigeria.
• Following the public outrage and media generated by the report, on Wednesday 5 October, the House of Representatives, part of Nigeria’s legislative body ordered an official investigation into the allegations that Shell fuelled violence in the Niger Delta by paying armed militant gangs.

The campaign is long and hard, but your ongoing support is vital. Please take a moment to support the campaign by getting yourself a copy (or two!) of the new report. Thank you in advance, and extra thanks go to our friends at New Internationalist for hosting the report in their inspiring shop!

PS. If you can’t afford to buy a copy now, the report is also available in pdf.

The action has collected over 14,900 signatures since Wednesday 19 October. Let’s see if we can hit 20,000 by the end of the week! Please sign the petition now.

Canada’s Dirty and Dangerous Oil Sands

EthicalOil.org has a reputation for using just about anything to promote Canada’s tar sands. The local mayor, Aboriginals and environmentalists have all been thrust into EthicalOil.org’s narrative, some against their will. This Monday it was my turn to get ‘tarred’ as the website’s spokesperson Kathryn Marshall declared herself to be on “the very same page” as me. The assertion could not be further from the truth.

I work for Platform, a UK based charity that is opposed to the exploitation of tar sands in Canada. We focus our campaigning efforts on key UK companies that are heavily invested in the tar sands, including BP, Shell and the Royal Bank of Scotland. We work with global allies such as Indigenous Environmental Network and Rainforest Action Network. We also oppose the ongoing human rights abuses and environmental devastation caused by Shell and its partners in Nigeria and beyond.

Continue reading here.

Last night, CBC Radio, a national station in Canada broadcast an interview with Ben Amunwa, author of Platform’s new report, Counting the Cost, on Shell’s human rights abuses in Nigeria.

Listen to more Platform podcasts here.

Counting the Cost implicates Shell in cases of serious violence in Nigeria’s oil-rich Niger Delta region from 2000 to 2010. The report uncovers how Shell’s routine payments to armed militants exacerbated conflicts, in one case leading to the destruction of Rumuekpe town where it is estimated that at least 60 people were killed. According to Platform’s report, Shell continues to rely on Nigerian government forces who have perpetrated systematic human rights abuses against local residents, including unlawful killings, torture and cruel, inhumane and degrading treatment. A summary of the report is available here.

Jonathan said the country has been running on a deficit budget because the institutions that are supposed to protect public resources and prevent leakages have collapsed.

He said his office has been turned into a regular consultation room for ministers because systemic rot made it impossible for them to operate independent of the presidency.

The president said even doctors, who are supposed to protect lives, sometimes end up killing people and nobody takes action because the institutions that should monitor their activities have also collapsed.

These issues are related to the impact of the discovery of oil, and the consequent dwindling of non-petroleum sectors such as agriculture and manufacturing.Nigeria relies on oil for over 89.4% of its total revenue. This overwhelming dependency on oil has created an economy based on rent rather than productive activity, corruption over public service, and a polity that does not rely on its citizens (and crucially, their votes), to survive. While the national elections in April 2011 marked an improvement on the blatant fraud of 2007, there were still widespread irregularities, especially in rural areas. It will take more than credible elections to cure Nigeria’s oil curse.

While the relationship between political and business elites is complex, Nigeria’s oil dependence has enabled multinational companies to act with impunity, exploit lax government regulations and get away with appalling abuses, from gas flaring to oil spills, that would not be tolerated elsewhere. Oil companies, like Shell, Chevron and ExxonMobil have benefited from political instability. Rather than harming business, Nigeria’s chaotic and ungoverned politics has opened the  for massive gains, fraudulent accounting and operational cost cutting. As ruling elites and companies benefit, over 70% of Nigerian citizens suffer below the poverty line.

Functioning government institutions are urgently needed in Nigeria to prevent the daily corruption and abuse of human rights that lie at the root of conflicts in the North and South of the country. But President Jonathan, in yesterday’s speech, was short on concrete proposals.

Royal Dutch Shell has been sued so many times over its conduct in Nigeria that its cases offer a laboratory experiment for human rights litigation.

After thirteen years of arduous U.S. alien tort litigation, Wiwa v. Shell resulted in a piddling $15.5 million settlement in 2009. Kiobel v. Shell has done even worse. Nearly a decade after the case was filed, it has succeeded only in abolishing the corporate alien tort within the Second Circuit, and if the U.S. Supreme Court accepts cert, it may do the same nationwide.

Now comes the “Bodo” case, which emerged from obscurity three weeks ago. On August 3, four months after farmers and fishermen from the village of Bodo filed a common law complaint in London high court, Shell’s Nigerian subsidiary admitted liability for a pair of oil spills in return for the parent company’s dismissal from the suit. The Financial Times trumpeted the potential for a payout of over $400 million, although the Shell Petroleum Development Company called this number “massively in excess of the true position.”

As Goldhaber makes clear, the Bodo case is far from over.

the Bodo deal was not a one-sided plaintiffs victory. Corporate formalities matter intensely to both Shell and its human rights critics. As Dutch plaintiffs lawyer Liesbeth Zevgeld has put it, “Shell headquarters believes it is untouchable, but we believe it is legally responsible for damage caused in Nigeria.”  More generally, parental liability for the conduct of foreign subsidiaries has been called the leading legal question in European business human rights. With Royal Dutch’s dismissal from the Bodo suit, that battle shifts to the impending Dutch trial of Oguru v. Shell, which seeks the cleanup of three oil spills elsewhere in the Niger delta. The stakes may be somewhat lower in the Netherlands, because Dutch courts lack the sort of class action rules that let U.K. lawyers aggregate 69,000 villagers’ claims for loss of livelihood.

Read the full article here.