Shell needs to pay or decommission old assets before Nigeria exit -report

Watch Shell needs to pay or decommission old assets before Nigeria exit -report - Guardian Nigeria on Dailymotion

Transcript

00:00 I'm appealing to the wonderful shareholders of Shell all over the world.

00:05 Shell may be leaving Nigeria's oil-rich Niger Delta, but communities in the region like that

00:11 of King Godwin Bebe Okpabi, paramount ruler in Nigale, want their energy major to clean up

00:17 before it goes.

00:19 Those dividends they get from the investment in Shell is blood money.

00:25 Shell has sold its onshore assets in Nigeria to a consortium. Over the years, spills caused by

00:30 theft, vandalism and operational issues have been costly for the company, both in terms of

00:36 repairs and court cases.

00:38 People in the Delta, like Ayubakura Warder, a farmer in Bayelsa state,

00:44 say decades of oil exploration have ruined farms and rivers.

00:49 She says the farmland she shares with her sister hasn't yielded any crops in years.

00:55 If they leave like that without healing the soil, how do we survive? Because we depend

01:02 on farming and fishing, and all the lakes and all the farms have been destroyed by crude.

01:08 Environmental groups like the Centre for Research on Multinational Corporations

01:12 are urging Nigerian authorities to ensure Shell safely dismantles its old infrastructure,

01:18 or pays to remove them before its exit.

01:22 Shell did not respond to requests for comment. It has long maintained that the spills are mostly

01:27 due to oil theft and interference with pipelines. And it said, when announcing its $2.4 billion

01:34 sale, that the responsibility for dealing with the spills would pass to Renaissance,

01:38 the buying consortium.

01:40 Laie Fatona, vice-chairman of ND Weston, one of the five companies in the consortium,

01:46 did not comment directly on the issue or how much it had budgeted to clean up,

01:50 but did say that the grouping would follow the country's legal requirements.

01:54 The head of the Nigerian Upstream Regulatory Commission has said that oil majors would need

02:00 to show compliance with rules on decommissioning before being given consent to leave. He did not

02:05 name Shell and declined to comment on whether the oil major or other companies had complied

02:09 with the rules. Nigeria's government has indicated that it would not block the Shell deal.

02:17 Meanwhile, in the delta, it's those like fisherman Chidioma Timothy who say

02:21 they've been left cleaning up.

02:23 He says he owns this lake, which he would fish or rent out,

02:28 but that he has not made any money from it since an oil spill in 2019.

02:33 I decided to enter the water to move the dirty bit by bit, so that

02:41 let me see whether I can have space to do my fishing.

02:45 However, he says you can still detect the smell of crude oil in the air,

02:50 and the fish that are caught here can't be eaten.

02:54 eaten.