Environmental friendly And Safety Advocate: LETS STOP AND THINK FOR A MOMENT THE ENVIRONMENTAL...

Environmental friendly And Safety Advocate: LETS STOP AND THINK FOR A MOMENT THE ENVIRONMENTAL...:  I will love with this little article to share my view on what many have been over looking or can i say a "near miss", the crash has been a...

Environmental friendly And Safety Advocate: LETS STOP AND THINK FOR A MOMENT THE ENVIRONMENTAL...

Environmental friendly And Safety Advocate: LETS STOP AND THINK FOR A MOMENT THE ENVIRONMENTAL...:  I will love with this little article to share my view on what many have been over looking or can i say a "near miss", the crash has been a...

LETS STOP AND THINK FOR A MOMENT THE ENVIRONMENTAL IMPACT OF DANA PLANE CRASH

 I will love with this little article to share my view on what many have been over looking or can i say a "near miss", the crash has been a great loss to nation economically and otherwise but lest not forget the impact of this crash on the Nigeria environment as a nation and the world at large.
We all know that Airplane or Air traveling is the major course of air pollution and the highest releases of CFC (chlorofluorocarbons).And this means increase in carbon emission and increase in global warming and climate change.
Pollution of the ground water which are non-point source, the debris from the clash can sip into the aquifer via wash off from rain and this can have adverse effect on the people of that particular environment because that is the major source of water supply for them.and you know aquifer or underground water are difficult to treat thereby leading to more death.what should be done, proper cleaning of that particular environment and proper disposer and ventilation of that area.http://oyakihlome.blogspot.com

Nigeria's agony dwarfs the Gulf oil spill. The US and Europe ignore it

The Deepwater Horizon disaster caused headlines around the world, yet the people who live in the Niger delta have had to live with environmental catastrophes for decades

http://bit.ly/KaB5Bz

A ruptured pipeline burns in a Lagos suburb after an explosion in 2008 which killed at least 100 people. Photograph: George Esiri/Reuters

We reached the edge of the oil spill near the Nigerian village of Otuegwe after a long hike through cassava plantations. Ahead of us lay swamp. We waded into the warm tropical water and began swimming, cameras and notebooks held above our heads. We could smell the oil long before we saw it – the stench of garage forecourts and rotting vegetation hanging thickly in the air.
The farther we travelled, the more nauseous it became. Soon we were swimming in pools of light Nigerian crude, the best-quality oil in the world. One of the many hundreds of 40-year-old pipelines that crisscross the Niger delta had corroded and spewed oil for several months.
Forest and farmland were now covered in a sheen of greasy oil. Drinking wells were polluted and people were distraught. No one knew how much oil had leaked. "We lost our nets, huts and fishing pots," said Chief Promise, village leader of Otuegwe and our guide. "This is where we fished and farmed. We have lost our forest. We told Shell of the spill within days, but they did nothing for six months."
That was the Niger delta a few years ago, where, according to Nigerian academics, writers and environment groups, oil companies have acted with such impunity and recklessness that much of the region has been devastated by leaks.
In fact, more oil is spilled from the delta's network of terminals, pipes, pumping stations and oil platforms every year than has been lost in the Gulf of Mexico, the site of a major ecological catastrophe caused by oil that has poured from a leak triggered by the explosion that wrecked BP's Deepwater Horizon rig last month.
That disaster, which claimed the lives of 11 rig workers, has made headlines round the world. By contrast, little information has emerged about the damage inflicted on the Niger delta. Yet the destruction there provides us with a far more accurate picture of the price we have to pay for drilling oil today.
On 1 May this year a ruptured ExxonMobil pipeline in the state of Akwa Ibom spilled more than a million gallons into the delta over seven days before the leak was stopped. Local people demonstrated against the company but say they were attacked by security guards. Community leaders are now demanding $1bn in compensation for the illness and loss of livelihood they suffered. Few expect they will succeed. In the meantime, thick balls of tar are being washed up along the coast.
Within days of the Ibeno spill, thousands of barrels of oil were spilled when the nearby Shell Trans Niger pipeline was attacked by rebels. A few days after that, a large oil slick was found floating on Lake Adibawa in Bayelsa state and another in Ogoniland. "We are faced with incessant oil spills from rusty pipes, some of which are 40 years old," said Bonny Otavie, a Bayelsa MP.
This point was backed by Williams Mkpa, a community leader in Ibeno: "Oil companies do not value our life; they want us to all die. In the past two years, we have experienced 10 oil spills and fishermen can no longer sustain their families. It is not tolerable."
With 606 oilfields, the Niger delta supplies 40% of all the crude the United States imports and is the world capital of oil pollution. Life expectancy in its rural communities, half of which have no access to clean water, has fallen to little more than 40 years over the past two generations. Locals blame the oil that pollutes their land and can scarcely believe the contrast with the steps taken by BP and the US government to try to stop the Gulf oil leak and to protect the Louisiana shoreline from pollution.
"If this Gulf accident had happened in Nigeria, neither the government nor the company would have paid much attention," said the writer Ben Ikari, a member of the Ogoni people. "This kind of spill happens all the time in the delta."
"The oil companies just ignore it. The lawmakers do not care and people must live with pollution daily. The situation is now worse than it was 30 years ago. Nothing is changing. When I see the efforts that are being made in the US I feel a great sense of sadness at the double standards. What they do in the US or in Europe is very different."
"We see frantic efforts being made to stop the spill in the US," said Nnimo Bassey, Nigerian head of Friends of the Earth International. "But in Nigeria, oil companies largely ignore their spills, cover them up and destroy people's livelihood and environments. The Gulf spill can be seen as a metaphor for what is happening daily in the oilfields of Nigeria and other parts of Africa.
"This has gone on for 50 years in Nigeria. People depend completely on the environment for their drinking water and farming and fishing. They are amazed that the president of the US can be making speeches daily, because in Nigeria people there would not hear a whimper," he said.
It is impossible to know how much oil is spilled in the Niger delta each year because the companies and the government keep that secret. However, two major independent investigations over the past four years suggest that as much is spilled at sea, in the swamps and on land every year as has been lost in the Gulf of Mexico so far.
One report, compiled by WWF UK, the World Conservation Union and representatives from the Nigerian federal government and the Nigerian Conservation Foundation, calculated in 2006 that up to 1.5m tons of oil – 50 times the pollution unleashed in the Exxon Valdez tanker disaster in Alaska – has been spilled in the delta over the past half century. Last year Amnesty calculated that the equivalent of at least 9m barrels of oil was spilled and accused the oil companies of a human rights outrage.
According to Nigerian federal government figures, there were more than 7,000 spills between 1970 and 2000, and there are 2,000 official major spillages sites, many going back decades, with thousands of smaller ones still waiting to be cleared up. More than 1,000 spill cases have been filed against Shell alone.
Last month Shell admitted to spilling 14,000 tonnes of oil in 2009. The majority, said the company, was lost through two incidents – one in which the company claims that thieves damaged a wellhead at its Odidi field and another where militants bombed the Trans Escravos pipeline.
Shell, which works in partnership with the Nigerian government in the delta, says that 98% of all its oil spills are caused by vandalism, theft or sabotage by militants and only a minimal amount by deteriorating infrastructure. "We had 132 spills last year, as against 175 on average. Safety valves were vandalised; one pipe had 300 illegal taps. We found five explosive devices on one. Sometimes communities do not give us access to clean up the pollution because they can make more money from compensation," said a spokesman.
"We have a full-time oil spill response team. Last year we replaced 197 miles of pipeline and are using every known way to clean up pollution, including microbes. We are committed to cleaning up any spill as fast as possible as soon as and for whatever reason they occur."
These claims are hotly disputed by communities and environmental watchdog groups. They mostly blame the companies' vast network of rusting pipes and storage tanks, corroding pipelines, semi-derelict pumping stations and old wellheads, as well as tankers and vessels cleaning out tanks.
The scale of the pollution is mind-boggling. The government's national oil spill detection and response agency (Nosdra) says that between 1976 and 1996 alone, more than 2.4m barrels contaminated the environment. "Oil spills and the dumping of oil into waterways has been extensive, often poisoning drinking water and destroying vegetation. These incidents have become common due to the lack of laws and enforcement measures within the existing political regime," said a spokesman for Nosdra.
The sense of outrage is widespread. "There are more than 300 spills, major and minor, a year," said Bassey. "It happens all the year round. The whole environment is devastated. The latest revelations highlight the massive difference in the response to oil spills. In Nigeria, both companies and government have come to treat an extraordinary level of oil spills as the norm."
A spokesman for the Stakeholder Democracy Network in Lagos, which works to empower those in communities affected by the oil companies' activities, said: "The response to the spill in the United States should serve as a stiff reminder as to how far spill management in Nigeria has drifted from standards across the world."
Other voices of protest point out that the world has overlooked the scale of the environmental impact. Activist Ben Amunwa, of the London-based oil watch group Platform, said: "Deepwater Horizon may have exceed Exxon Valdez, but within a few years in Nigeria offshore spills from four locations dwarfed the scale of the Exxon Valdez disaster many times over. Estimates put spill volumes in the Niger delta among the worst on the planet, but they do not include the crude oil from waste water and gas flares. Companies such as Shell continue to avoid independent monitoring and keep key data secret."
Worse may be to come. One industry insider, who asked not to be named, said: "Major spills are likely to increase in the coming years as the industry strives to extract oil from increasingly remote and difficult terrains. Future supplies will be offshore, deeper and harder to work. When things go wrong, it will be harder to respond."
Judith Kimerling, a professor of law and policy at the City University of New York and author of Amazon Crude, a book about oil development in Ecuador, said: "Spills, leaks and deliberate discharges are happening in oilfields all over the world and very few people seem to care."
There is an overwhelming sense that the big oil companies act as if they are beyond the law. Bassey said: "What we conclude from the Gulf of Mexico pollution incident is that the oil companies are out of control.
"It is clear that BP has been blocking progressive legislation, both in the US and here. In Nigeria, they have been living above the law. They are now clearly a danger to the planet. The dangers of this happening again and again are high. They must be taken to the international court of justice." PLEASE WHAT IS YOUR TAKE ON THIS DO REPLY THANKS.oyakihlome.blogspot.com

Environmental friendly And Safety Advocate: HYDROCARBON EXPLOITATION, ENVIRONMENTAL DEGRADATIO...

Environmental friendly And Safety Advocate: HYDROCARBON EXPLOITATION, ENVIRONMENTAL DEGRADATIO...: http://bit.ly/KaB5Bz 2.0 OIL RESOURCE EXPLOITATION IN THE NIGER DELTA. OIL RESOURCE EXPLORATION AND PRODUCTION. oyakihlome.blogspot.com...

HYDROCARBON EXPLOITATION, ENVIRONMENTAL DEGRADATION

http://bit.ly/KaB5Bz2.0 OIL RESOURCE EXPLOITATION IN THE NIGER DELTA.

1. OIL RESOURCE EXPLORATION AND PRODUCTION.oyakihlome.blogspot.com

The effect of oil resource extraction on the environment of the Niger Delta has been very glaring in terms of its negative effect on the region. Eteng 1997, p 4 stated that "Oil exploration and exploitation has over the last four decades impacted disastrously on the socio-physical environment of the Niger Delta oil- bearing communities, massively threatening the subsistent peasant economy and the environment and hence the entire livelihood and basic survival of the people." Suffice it to note that, while oil extraction has caused negative socio-economic and environmental problems in the Niger Delta, the Nigerian State has benefited immensely from petroleum since it was discovered in commercial quantities in 1956. The Central Bank of Nigeria (C.B.N) 1981 annual report stated as follows,
"Oil which was first discovered in 1956 and first exported in 1958 accounted for more than 90% of Nigerian exports by value and about 80% of government revenue as at December 31, 1981….
The overall contribution of the oil sector to the national economy also grew from an insignificant 0.1% in 1959 to 87% in 1976."
There is no doubt that the Nigerian oil industry has affected the country in a variety of ways at the same time. On one hand, it has fashioned a remarkable economic landscape for the country, however on the negative side, petroleum exploration and production also have adverse effects on fishing and farming which are the traditional means of livelihood of the people of the oil producing communities in the Niger Delta, Nigeria.
If the oil industry is considered in view of its enormous contribution to foreign exchange earning, it has achieved a remarkable success. On the other scale, When considered in respect of it's negative impact on the socio-economic life and the environment of the immediate oil bearing local communities and its inhabitants, it has left a balance sheet of ecological and socio-physical disaster. This rightly provides a framework to evaluate the work of neo-classical economists whom argue that the development of primary resource materials for export in the periphery is the basis for development in the peripheral countries.
2.2 PRODUCING FOR EXPORT.
Nigeria like most other less developed countries in the early part of the 70's, were engaged in intensive natural resource exploitation as a way of stimulating economic growth. It was projected by several multilateral funding organisations such as the International Monetary Fund (IMF)and the World Bank that export drive of primary resource materials will eventually lead to economic growth and subsequently a significant reduction in the level of poverty. The projection was that the long-term gain of such a process would set the stage for a sustained economic development.
As at 1976, about 10 years from the start of the oil export drive. Figures available from the Federal Office of Statistics stated that oil has come to account for about 14% of the nation's gross domestic product (GNP) of Nigeria. 95% of the total export and over 80% of government annual revenue. Total export peaked at two million barrels of crude oil per day with price range of $18-$22 per barrel. This created more opportunity for the development of new oil fields, increase granting of mining licenses and the intensive exploitation of oil mineral resources in the Niger Delta.
The multinational oil companies made huge investments in the oil sector, which was quite technological and capital intensive. New laws were made which includes the petroleum act of 1969 and the land use Decree/Act of 1978. This legislation regulated community access to communal or open access land and they were primarily promulgated to restrict access to such land, while at the same time making it possible for the Multinational investors to have unrestricted access to explore for oil unchallenged even on sacred land.
These changes have led to a series of social conflict between the community people and the State/Oil companies as will be discussed later.
2.3 PEASANT AGRICULTURE IN THE NIGER DELTA AREAS.
Agriculture forms the most dominant economic activity in the Niger Delta. Federal Office of Statistics (F.O.S) in 1985 stated that Crop farming and fishing activities account for about 90% of all forms of activities in the area. They also estimated that about 50%-68% of the active labour force are engaged in one form of agricultural activity or the other including fishing and farming. Agricultural technology has remained relatively unchanged over the years and over 90% of the farmers are subsistent farmers operating on traditional methods using basic tools. Azibolomari 1998, p 67 stated that
"Farming technique in the Niger Delta has still remained the use of land rotation or bush fallow system characterised by land and labour being the principal inputs of production."
The organic farming technique widely used in the Niger Delta is highly susceptible to environmental changes affecting the soil, water and or deforestation because it is not technologically inspired, but rather land and labour intensive. Oil extraction and production has led to adverse environmental impact on the soil, forest and water of the Niger Delta communities. This has ultimately affected peasant agriculture in a variety of ways, which ultimately have caused problems of environmental refugees. Some of the landless farmers migrate to other more fertile lands in other rural communities, putting pressure on scarce fertile lands. While some of the displaced farmers out-migrate to the urban areas in search of other means of livelihood.
Various harmful and toxic organic compounds when introduced into the natural environment during oil extraction such as during seismic work, oil spill, gas flares and several other forms of pollution, changes the geo-chemical composition of the soil, river and other components of the environment. This in turn affects agriculture and lead to a drastic decline in output in both fishing and farming activities. Staney 1990, pp 67-79 noted that
"7.7% of the 797 people interviewed on the socio-economic impact of oil in Nigeria identified farm land pollution as a major problem".
The peasants are very reactive to these changes because of the unavailability of modern farming and fishing techniques to meet the challenges of a declining soil and Marine resources. The drastic fall in output of the agricultural product, lead to intensive exploitation of other fertile land. The long run effect of this is land degradation and immigration to other rural and urban areas, where pressure is exerted on the often inadequate and dilapidated infrastructure, leading to increase poverty.
In addition, Ikporukpo 1981, pp 23-26 stated that
"Most farmers are concerned with problems of displacement without resettlement during oil spills". Gbadegesin 1997, p 9 further noted that
"Apart from loss of farms, oil spills have led to extensive deforestation with no adequate replanting practices…this in effect has shortened fallow periods, compounded land use degradation and led to a loss of soil fertility and consequently erosion of the top soil".
Elliot 1998, p 82 stated that
"The slash and burn agriculture traditionally practised by shifting cultivators-up to 10% of the world's population-is based on ecologically sound principles. It minimises threats to the forest by leaving land fallow over periods of time long enough for regeneration…. Landless peasants whom have been forced from their own lands, increases the number of people pursuing such a subsistence life style, this contributes to deforestation through further encroachment on forest lands and reductions in fallow times".
The out-migration of the rural displaced farmers in the Niger Delta as a result of environmental degradation caused by oil extraction in the region has led a significant percentage of the local inhabitants to remain in cyclical poverty and penury. This has meant greater environmental degradation as a result of the intensive exploitation of the few remaining fertile land in the region by the residents. It has also led to increasing urban blight in the urban areas in the Niger Delta as more and more displaced rural inhabitant flood the urban areas in search of non-existent jobs.

3. ENVIRONMENTAL AND SOCIAL IMPLICATION OF INTENSIVE OIL RESOURCE EXPLOITATION IN THE NIGER DELTA.
4. In this section, the paper will look more specifically at various environmental and socio-economic problems that have been identified as a result of the intensive extraction of natural oil resources in the Niger Delta communities in Nigeria.
1. ENVIRONMENTAL PROBLEMS.

Nwankwo and Ifeadi 1988, pp 58-64 identified the following factors as some of the pollution problems associated with oil exploration and production in the Niger Delta.

• Contamination of Streams and River.

In the course of oil exploration and production in the Niger Delta, various materials are released into the environment. For example during exploration, drill cuttings, drill muds and fluids are used for stimulating production.

• The problem of Oil Spill.

Transportation and marketing, damage to oil pipelines and accidents involving road trucks and tankers generate oil spills and hydrocarbon emissions which according to Ikporukpo 1988, p 79 have a far more reaching effects, because the toxicity of the oil adversely affect the soil, plant, animal and water resources.

• Forest Destruction and Bio-diversity loss.

The major constituents of drill cuttings such as barytes and bentonite clays when dumped on the ground prevent plant growth until natural processes develop new topsoil. In water according to Nwankwo and Ifeadi (1988), these materials disperse and sink, killing marine animals.

• The Environmental Effect of Gas Flaring.

Flaring of natural gas has also been identified as having negative impact on surrounding vegetation. Isiche and Stanford 1976, pp 177-187.

Environmental friendly And Safety Advocate: Americans still support environmental protection, ...

Environmental friendly And Safety Advocate: Americans still support environmental protection, ...: Americans still support environmental protection, thank you http//www.oyakihlome.blogspot.com A versi...