The Development of a Framework for Assessing the Impact of Oil Spills in the Ogoni Land of Nigeria Niger Delta
Authors:   , Ben Ime Okon 
Published: March 2024

Oil exploration and petroleum hydrocarbon pollution have become synonymous in the Niger Delta over the past few decades. Oil pollution incidents can occur through equipment failure, sabotage, or oil mismanagement. These events have led to significant environmental damage and reported poor health conditions among the local communities. Despite the financial benefits to the Country from oil wealth, the Niger Delta and oil-producing communities in the Ogoniland area, part of the Niger Delta, continue to experience the negative impacts of oil pollution and witness limited investment or reparation for the environmental damage. In 2011, the United Nations Environmental Program Assessment in Ogoniland highlighted the importance of restoring the impacted area, yet pollution incidents continue to occur with significant environmental and community consequences. From an initial proposal to undertake bioremediation trials from locally sourced contaminated soils using agricultural waste materials, the research was redirected towards the undertaking of a series of focus groups across several communities in the Ogoniland area, together with the detailed analysis of incident and recovery reports produced by Shell and National Oil Spill and Detection Agency (NOSDRA). Tai, Eleme, Gokana and Khana are the four local government areas of Ogoniland, categorised into four communities of Gio, Ogale, Ke-Dere and Kwawa, selected for structured interviews in the framework of gender-based focus groups. The groups explored environmental, health, economic, cultural and societal issues together with the view of the communities toward the principal oil company in the regions (Shell) and governmental departments. All communities directly experience oil contamination, not just from the impact on land and water but also from air-borne emissions likely to be produced from local flaring. The focus group research also shows that there has been a significant impact on the cultural activities with a significant amount of mistrust between communities, leaders, companies and authorities. Over 800 oil pollution incident reports were analysed and mapped on GIS to determine additional information on how far each incident was from the nearest watercourse. Further analysis was carried out by plotting out each incident on Google maps, satellite imagery and determining the distance of each incident from 5 properties or more. The physical characteristics of the spill event (location, volume spilt, area of land affected) were combined with distance parameters (distance from watercourse, distance from community) to explore the possibility of using a new Oil Spill Severity Index (OSSI). Each parameter was given a score from 1-10, and a weighting was applied to consider the relative impacts of the different parameters towards an overall OSSI Index out of 100. The index was further simplified to very high, high, medium or low. It is recognised that the selection of scoring and weighting is (a) specific to the Niger Delta data set and (b) subjective, based on the information provided in inspection reports. Nevertheless, the OSSI was shown to describe specific case study reports across the VH/H/M/L index accurately. Therefore, it is suggested that such an OSSI index could be used as a tool by authorities to prioritise remediation investment and help mitigate the environmental impact of the most serious incidents based on its area of impact, the volume of spills, the distance of spill incident to the watercourse and the distance to the community settlement.