Exploding Niger Delta pipelines reignite debate over ageing infra

After at least three fires and blasts on oil and gas pipelines were reported in the space of the last week in Nigeria’s oil-rich Niger Delta, a debate has reopened into corporate responsibility for ageing oil and gas infrastructure.

The unexplained explosions and fires took place in the Niger Delta, a highly-industrialised area where fossil fuel infrastructure already poses a serious health risk to local communities, especially children, who are exposed to perilous gas flaring, as previously reported by Gas Outlook.

Africa’s largest oil producer also has the world’s ninth-largest gas reserves and is a major methane emitter, accounting for 16 percent of sub-Saharan African methane emissions between 2010 and 2020, putting local people, particularly children, at heightened risk of a range of health problems. Children under five years old are most at risk — of coughs, respiratory symptoms, fever and short-term nutritional issues including being underweight — according to the World Bank.

Nigeria’s President Bola Tinubu swiftly imposed emergency rule in the Delta’s Rivers State last week, but he also blamed the blasts on attacks on oil installations and political dysfunction, without identifying the names of any of the alleged attackers.

Nigeria does have a long history of militant attacks on its oil and gas infrastructure. But critics say that blaming the fires on militancy masks another problem plaguing Nigerian frontline communities: the safety risks posed by ageing oil and gas infrastructure, and the dire lack of corporate accountability for those.

One such critic, Fyneface Dumnamene Fyneface, executive director of the Youth and Environmental Advocacy Center, a local nonprofit, dismissed speculation that the explosions were due to sabotage linked to ethnic tension in the region, pointing out that Ogoniland — where the pipeline attacks occurred — does not belong to either the Ikwerre or Ijaw ethnic groups, which have been at the centre of that dispute.

Instead, he told the Daily Post that the explosion on the Trans-Niger Pipeline (TNP), one of Nigeria’s longest pipelines carrying crude from the Niger Delta to the Bonny terminal, was due to ageing infrastructure and that the companies that operate the pipeline should take more responsibility in maintaining it. The Renaissance Africa consortium — made up of five leading Nigerian E&P companies — took over operatorship of the TNP and the Bonny terminal from Shell just earlier this year.

These pipelines have been laid for over sixty years, and as a result, “they are bursting and deflating like balloons when there is heavy pressure transporting crude oil to the export terminal in Bonny,” Fyneface told the Nigerian daily.

“A lot of these things have been happening, and more are still going to happen because a lot of these pipelines are already bad, already weak. And divestment is going on, where the multinational oil companies are handing over these facilities to indigenous companies who even lack the technological capacity and finances to run them.

“So, we are going to have more explosions of this nature, more equipment failures of this nature, and more oil spills in the future because the system has not been maintained the way it ought to be,” he warned.

It comes at a time of tension vis-à-vis oil and gas divestment in Nigeria. Last August, French oil major TotalEnergies inked a deal to sell its 10% interest in Shell Petroleum Development Company of Nigeria (SPDC) to local player Chappal Energies, prompting concern over the ethics of foreign majors abandoning environmental damage in communities that have experienced significant environmental degradation as a result of oil spillage in the Niger Delta. And earlier this month, Shell, for its part, completed the sale of its 30% stake in SPDC to local player Renaissance.

Between 2011 and 2022, Nigeria’s National Oil Spill Detection and Response Agency logged 10,463 spill occurrences in the Niger Delta, which resulted in the release of 507,135 barrels of oil into the environment.

As if the risk of oil spillage and emissions-induced health problems were not enough, long-suffering Nigerian frontline communities are now facing the threat of foreign majors selling their assets without meeting their ethical responsibilities to clean up and make them safe beforehand, say experts. 

Ayodele Oni, a partner at Bloomfield Law Practice, previously told Gas Outlook that host communities may fear that the divestiture of ageing assets is a tactic employed by IOCs to evade spill and Decommissioning and Abandonment (D&A) liabilities, potentially jeopardising the environmental safety of the communities.

The Petroleum Industry Act has established provisions for environmental remediation and D&A obligations, including the introduction of dedicated funds for these purposes, he added.