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Article

7 Jun 2017

Author:
Udeme Akpan, Ediri Ejoh & Prince Okafor, Vanguard (Nigeria)

Nigeria: Cleanup of pollution from oil production would cost over US$50 billion, says academic study

Nigeria: Cleanup of Oil Producing Areas to Cost $50 Billion, 6 Jun 2017

There are strong indications that the cleanup of over 2,500 contaminated sites in Nigeria's oil producing areas would cost the federal government and other stakeholders over $50 billion. A breakdown showed that it would cost $6 billion to cleanup Ogoniland alone while other parts of the Niger Delta would gulp about $44 billion. The exercise, it was gathered would take more than 50 years to execute through massive deployment of suitable technologies, experts and volunteers.... Professor Hilary Inyang [Vice Chancellor, Botswana International University of Science and Technology]...has completed a scientific study of the areas... 

"From my review of circumstances at some sites, about 30 percent of the sites will simply need to be evacuated because of the risk of cumulative exposure to contaminants...," he [said]... According to him, environmental pollution is a contributor to the low life expectancy of about 54.6 years estimated for all parts of Nigeria...

The Environmental Rights Action/Friends of the Earth Nigeria, ERA/FoEN, disclosed that several months after the government launched the clean-up of Ogoniland, actual work has not yet started in the area...

Meanwhile, Shell Petroleum Development Company of Nigeria Limited (SPDC), operator of the SPDC Joint Venture that operated in Ogoniland from the 1950s to the early 1990s, indicated in its latest report that most of UNEP's recommendations [for cleanup of oil pollution in the region]...were directed at the Federal Government of Nigeria... [The] company indicated that over the last five years, SPDC has taken action on all the UNEP recommendations addressed specifically to it as operator of the SPDC JV and has completed a majority of these recommendations.