Honor Thy Label by Gero Leson

Author:Gero Leson [Leson, Gero]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2021-03-09T00:00:00+00:00

THE OTHER OIL—THE IMPACT OF PETROLEUM IN NIGERIA

Escravos, Nigeria, 2002

It was late 2002, three years before starting Serendipol in Sri Lanka, when I took my first trip to Nigeria. Chevron had hired me to help coordinate a research project in one of their main petroleum operations in the northwestern part of the Niger Delta.

From our helicopter I marveled at the meandering natural waterways that crisscrossed the area. There also were a few straight, obviously manmade canals, but no roads; all transport was by boats. The occasional village had twenty to fifty simple houses with sheet metal roofs and jetties.

The land was flat and low-lying, much of it covered by grass and tidal water. There were extended areas without any vegetation, strongly eroded mud flats and swamps with dead oil palms. I then saw live oil palms on knolls farther inland. Why did they do well at an elevation but die in the flats?

Satellite photos and reports from the ground showed that large portions of the local freshwater swamps and forest had been destroyed since the early 1980s. Shell and Gulf Oil, whose Nigerian leases Chevron took over in 1991, had drilled and pumped oil in these areas—yet the widespread damage to vegetation was clearly not related to oil spills.

The purpose of our project was to determine the causes and chronology of this ecological disaster and assess whether and how some of its fallout could be remedied.

I first arrived in late 2002 at Escravos, Chevron’s oil and gas terminal at the mouth of the Escravos River and our base for the survey, then spent some six weeks there between January and March 2003. Our field team included Chevron Nigeria staff and consultants, several Nigerian ecologists and soil scientists, and two US experts in sedimentation and hydrological surveys. By boat or helicopter and then by foot we set out to explore preselected transects, taking soil samples, photos, and descriptions of the vegetation.

January and February are dry and mild in the delta, and I enjoyed the hikes through mangroves, then often into the mud flats filled with dead trees. Walk a little farther, and one found large green areas with alternating salt-tolerant ferns and grasses.

It didn’t take a biologist to quickly grasp that the destruction and change we witnessed had been caused by the intrusion of saltwater into a freshwater habitat. In fact, Chevron scientists knew that the gradual dredging of the area in the 1970s to create access for the large oil-producing platforms called “flow stations” had also allowed saltwater to invade this very low-lying area. This gradually destroyed freshwater vegetation and fisheries—as well as the livelihoods they had once supported.

For all I can tell, this effect was not anticipated or sanctioned. It developed over time and was accelerated by a catastrophic synergy. The sand bar that had protected one of the main artificial canals, Opuekeba, from the ocean was gradually washed away and eventually breached in the 1980s. The root cause was the construction of the first large hydroelectric dam on the Niger River in the 1960s.

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