- Documents disclosed as part of a lawsuit against UK-based oil company Shell show leadership continued operating a compromised pipeline in Nigeria’s Niger Delta despite knowing it posed a pollution risk in the surrounding coastal wetland environment.
- According to locals in Bille, a town near the pipeline, oil spills between 2011 and 2013 killed thousands of hectares of mangroves and aquatic life that rely on the wetland ecosystem, impacting people who depend on fishing.
- Shell said organized criminal gangs were responsible for the spills and that shutting down the pipeline and removing illegal connections also came with security risks.
- The Niger Delta region is a globally important biodiversity hotspot, hosting four Ramsar Wetlands and the largest mangrove forest in Africa.
Global oil giant Shell continued operating a compromised pipeline in Nigeria’s Niger Delta despite knowing it posed a pollution risk in the surrounding coastal wetland environment, newly disclosed internal company communications reveal.
The emails and memos, reviewed by Mongabay, show senior leadership knew of the poor conditions of the 97-kilometer (60-mile) Nembe Creek Trunk Line as early as 2008. Despite concerns it was operating outside technical integrity standards and proposals to shut it down, a top executive decided to keep pumping oil through the line.
Carrying 150,000 barrels of oil per day to the export terminal at Bonny Island Rivers state, the Nembe Creek Trunk Line is a critical oil artery in Nigeria. Throughout the years, theft from the pipeline using illegal connections caused spills into the vast mangrove ecosystem of true (Rhizophora sp.) and flowering black (Avicennia sp.) tree species. An internal 2013 Shell document coded such tampered lines as “red,” requiring either their immediate shutdown or immediate action to remove all illegal connections.
Locals from the nearby riverine Bille community said the oil spills killed about 2,000 hectares (4,900 acres) of mangrove swamps around the village while impacting an area of 13,200 hectares (32,600 acres). The contaminated waterways and degraded ecosystem, they told Mongabay, killed fish and other aquatic life. Satellite imagery surrounding the village shows massive degradation of the mangroves.
“The aquatic life is gone. Our people can no longer go to the river and catch reasonable fish — they can’t even find the fish in the first place,” Boma Renner Igolima-Dappa, spokesperson for the Bille Kingdom Chiefs Council, told Mongabay on the phone.
In an email to Mongabay, Shell maintained that organized criminal gangs were responsible for the spills, while underlining the difficulties in operating in the Niger Delta’s precarious security environment.
“Shell’s former subsidiary worked with Nigerian authorities, its government-owned partner and local communities to respond to these challenges, including cleaning up spills,” a spokesperson wrote.
“Shutting down pipelines meant thieves could drill more holes along their hundreds of kilometers length and accessing the area to remove theft points was often fraught with security risks.”
A law firm representing the communities shared the internal communications with Mongabay as part of a lawsuit filed in 2015 against Shell and its former Nigerian subsidiary, Shell Petroleum Development Company of Nigeria (SPDC). The same year, Shell sold the pipeline. The claimants, members of the Bille community, said the company holds responsibility for oil spills occurring from oil theft at the Nembe Creek Trunk Line between 2011 and 2013.
“What has now emerged through disclosure is that executives in London were deeply responsible for what was happening in Nigeria,” Matthew Renshaw from Leigh Day, the U.K.-based law firm representing members of the affected Bille community, told Mongabay in a phone call. “Things like continuing to pump oil through infrastructure that was highly problematic, not properly maintaining that infrastructure, and making decisions about whether and how much to clean up oil spills.”
Bille is a riverine settlement in the Niger Delta, with a population of around 30,000 people who live on 45 scattered islands in the region.
A degradation hotspot
Research has identified the area around Bille as a “mangrove degradation hotspot” within the eastern Niger Delta. A 2020 study linked extensive mangrove degradation in the peninsula surrounding the Bille to a large amount of oil spills in the area in those years.
Igolima-Dappa said that, apart from the economic value of the mangrove colonies, the trees also shield the communities from floods, are used for medicinal purposes and carry spiritual significance.
Many traditional shrines of the Bille kingdom’s Ijaw clan, an ethnic group, are located in these environments. They are places where people perform rituals and connect with their ancestral heritage. The creeks, mangroves, and waterways are part of their identity, Igolima-Dappa said.
Other community members Mongabay spoke to confirmed that the ecosystem that once supported aquatic life — fish, shellfish, oysters and periwinkles — has been affected by Shell’s operations.
The Niger Delta region is a globally important biodiversity hotspot, hosting four Ramsar Wetlands and the largest mangrove forest in Africa.
But it is also home to a large part of Nigeria’s upstream oil and gas infrastructure, and pipelines transporting oil to the export terminals are running throughout the swamps and wetlands of the region.
Decades of oil extraction, spills, illegal refining and pipeline leaks have left large parts of the Niger Delta heavily polluted.
The researchers analyzing land-cover change across the Niger Delta in 2020, found a net loss of 25,000 hectares (61,770 acres) of mangroves between 2000 and 2013, with degraded mangrove areas continuing to expand.
“When mangroves are degraded from oil spills, the whole system collapses for decades,” one of the study authors, Elias Symeonakis from Manchester Metropolitan University in the U.K., told Mongabay. Symeonakis said that it is very easy to detect degraded mangroves on satellite imagery due to the layers in which the data comes out. Mangroves degraded by oil spills look “black and miserable,” he said.
Who is responsible?
According to Leigh Day’s Renshaw, Shell does not dispute that there was devastation between 2011 and 2013. The question in the lawsuit is about who carries responsibility.
“Shell has always maintained that they’re not responsible because most of the damage they say was caused by oil theft … was caused by people stealing oil from Shell’s pipelines, and that led to environmental harm,” he said.
The company’s internal documents show the issue of oil leaks and its impacts on the environment and communities were known to leadership, both in the London headquarters as well as in Nigeria.
In a 2008 email exchange reviewed by Mongabay, Shell’s regional executive vice president at the time, Ann Pickard, reinforced her decision to keep pumping oil through the compromised pipeline even though the then technical vice president Markus Droll had raised concerns that the pipeline was operating outside standards. Droll laid out the risks of continuing operations and proposed shutting down the well supplying the line in parallel to measures safeguarding the pipeline and replacing the line.
“I find the argument that we can’t effectively shut the supplying wells down as a reason to keep going, at best weak. If there is another massive explosive attack tomorrow … then we could well find ourselves in the situation of simply having to close the production down, no further choices to be made,” he wrote, adding that he doesn’t agree that costs would be an issue.
“Sorry if I sound like a broken record on this – but the approach makes me – as your Technical VP – pretty uncomfortable.”
Pickard said in an emailed response she decided continuing operations was “the lower risk to both people and environment,” while criticizing Droll for not protecting the content of the email from courts by putting it under legal privilege.
“You have just exposed us significantly in your official disagreement as technical manager,” she wrote.
A 2013 strategy review of Shell companies in Nigeria mentioned that oil theft at SPDC’s operations resulted “in large volumes of oil being spilled, with devastating consequences for the Delta environment. SPDC’s concession area is badly affected, particularly along the main oil export pipelines.”
The review laid out a divestment scenario based on the “recent ramp up in oil theft activities, and in particular the associated oil spills” that “have called into question if SPDC’s current operating model in the Delta is sustainable.”
In its response to Mongabay, Shell spokesperson Paul Connolly wrote that most of the oil pollution in the Niger Delta has been caused by “large-scale oil theft, sabotage and illegal refining, carried out by organized criminal gangs,” and the company’s former subsidiary tried to respond to these challenges.
“Of the large volume of documents provided to the claimants’ legal team, the documents selected are presented without the critical context of the operating environment in the Niger Delta at the time,” he wrote.
Connolly added that removing illegal connections on pipelines was not straightforward and “operational decisions were, therefore, taken in a highly complex environment, balancing safety, environmental considerations and security risks.”
The High Court trial against Shell PLC by the Niger Delta communities is scheduled to begin in early 2027. Bille community members told Mongabay that they want Shell to clean up the pollution and provide compensation for what has been lost.
“In Billeland, land is so important because it was given to us by our ancestors,” Igolima-Dappa said. “The most important is that there is a thorough clean-up. Then they have to compensate, in whatever kind.”
Additional reporting by Latoya Abulu.
Banner image: A man fishes in the Niger Delta near the village of Diebu, Nigeria, Saturday, May 18, 2013. Image by Jon Gambrell / AP Photo.
Ogoni women restore mangroves and livelihoods in oil-rich Niger Delta
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Citations:
Nababa, I., Symeonakis, E., Koukoulas, S., Higginbottom, T., Cavan, G., & Marsden, S. (2020). Land cover dynamics and mangrove degradation in the Niger Delta region. Remote Sensing, 12(21), 3619. doi:10.3390/rs12213619
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