Oil spill is a menace that has persisted for several decades in Nigeria. Musa Idris, Director-General of the National Oil Spill Detection and Response Agency (NOSDRA), in this interview, speaks on the need for the agency to look into both the mid and down streams of the petroleum industry, to reduce the incidences of oil spills. ADETOLA BADEMOSI presents excerpts.
As the DG of NOSDRA, what have you done differently from others who preceded you?
I was here right from the inception of this agency. I was part of the pioneer staff before the establishment bill was signed into law to become an Act in October 18, 2006. I was here as Director, Oil Field Assessment for over eight years before I was deployed to commence the second Hydrocarbon Pollution Remediation Project (HYPREP).
In 2017, I became the head of operations of the newly formed HYPREP in Port Harcourt where I spent two years before I was appointed as the DG NOSDRA. On my appointment, I resolved to change the face of things.
First, I decided to restore discipline. We also started to inculcate what we have to do into the psychic of officers by putting our officers through induction courses. I remember when I met the former Permanent Secretary, I told her we would be doing certain things differently. I said one, we would be completing our laboratory in Port Harcourt within six months but she did not believe it and I said give it to me as a test. This was in July and just two months after I resumed and by December 2019, I sent a letter of invitation for the commissioning of the laboratory. The commissioning took place on January 10, 2020. Besides, I also said that we would go into the downstream sector.
Why are you looking at the mid and down streams of the petroleum industry?
We have placed more attention on the upstream, little on the midstream but almost not much on the downstream except in our Lagos area where officers took up the midstream and the downstream which was possible, because they did not have much upstream activities to carry out. Out of eleven stations, only one was rarely covering the midstream and downstream effectively. Of course, the bulk of the midstream is in Lagos but the downstream are all over Nigeria. Ordinarily, this programme was to commence in 2015, then I was a director here but because there was not much interest from the leadership. So, we started with the downstream. Now, we are in the upstream, midstream and downstream.
Quite a number of the downstream operators do not care about the environment, not because they do not really care but because they don’t know much about their responsibilities to the environment. Most of them just dig the ground, put their underground storage tank, go to NNPC depot, buy their petroleum product and dump it into the tanks. Some of them may have their tanks buried for close to six to ten years without removing it one day to check the state of the tank. They just sell and get their money.
Why do they have to check their tanks periodically?
They have to check if it is leaking or not. When you get to any filling station, you will see a point where they normally discharge petroleum products and you always see a pipe that goes up. That pipe allows hydrocarbon vapour to go up into the air, without building up underground with the heat, which can easily explode. Apart from what we can excuse as vaporized content of the tank, your loss is supposed to be insignificant but when you see that you deposited about 33,000litres and you expected certain amounts, for instance if your total earnings is short by about N2000-N5000, you may shrug and say maybe it is part of what evaporated but when it gets to N10,000-N15,000, you begin to suspect the attendants, when it starts getting to N50,000-N100,000 you start suspecting the station manager until it now begins to increase. Probably what has been happening is there is a leakage in the underground tank somewhere and the petroleum product is seeping gradually into the ground. It will not be until the owner checks the state of the tank that he will see that a section of the tank has been leaking gradually. It may even be a tiny hole and it keeps smearing into the ground. Until the content reaches the ground water level and follows the water into a nearby borehole and your neighbour cries out that there is petrol in his borehole.
We are beginning to have such cases in high numbers. Before now, in a state we might not have one, but now we are beginning to have them and what we need to do here is what we call a stitch in time saves nine.
Can you make arrests in that case?
We cannot arrest. It is not about arrest. When you see such, what you do is to stop users of such tanks, exhume and begin the process of remediation. We are currently handling one in Nyanya, Karu axis. Adjacent to a filling station is a clinic that has hydrocarbon in its borehole and that was how we went there and discovered that indeed their tank was not leaking because they had some contingency measures to prevent such but between the pipe and the nozzle, it was one of the connecting pipes that cracked and petrol was seeping from there and they did not know. Work is ongoing there, we have done some laboratory analysis and the process of remediation is beginning. Looking at that, we invited operators in the mid and down streams. I especially invited DAPMAN (Depots and Petroleum Products Marketers Association of Nigeria). We have also invited MOMAN (Major Oil Marketers Association of Nigeria) and we invited IPMAN. So we have held a lot of interactive sessions and we have discussed the modalities of bringing them to environment consciousness and they were really cooperative. I am yet to achieve my visions completely because my vision is in tandem with the vision of the agency itself. It is zero tolerance to oil spill and when it comes to funding, I must say that the entire Federal Ministry of Environment is inadequately funded. Take for instance in 2020, the entire capital budget for a ministry that has seven agencies was N7 billion. So you can see that this is grossly inadequate and anything that anybody does is on the environment and we need to do a lot at the same time.
Since NOSDRA disclosed plans to move to the down-stream, there have been complaints from DPR that your agency is encroaching on its duties. Does your Act back your current move?
The establishment Act supports it, the regulations support it. This agency is to ensure that we have zero tolerance to oil spill. All I have mentioned so far is on spilling, I am not talking about how much petrol is put in a tank, I am not talking about the land you allocate for a filling station, I am talking about what goes to the ground water which is deep, what goes to the ground is key. But when we talk about the Department of Petroleum Resources (DPR) right from where oil exploration started, they have been there but unfortunately attention has always been on production, little attention was paid to the environment. Let me say something, environmental management in the petroleum sector vis-a-vis oil spillages that were attended to until the Ministry of Environment came into being was haphazard.
When the Ministry was established in 1999, it was put under the department of environmental resources which has three divisions. One was oil and gas, another is EIA and the third one was the standard and monitoring department. In oil and gas, we started with what we called legacy sites, sites that have had oil spills across all the oil companies operating in the upstream; Shell, Mobile, Total, Agip and others. We first dealt with those ones. Some of them had already naturally taken care of themselves because crude oil is from the earth and it is fossil. Over time, the bacteria that kill the carbon chain have taken their toll on the crude oil, naturally the environment also adjusted to it. There were some that still remained as it were, we called all the oil companies to first clear those ones. Sometime in 1999, immediately when the Environment Ministry was setup, we had what is called the National Forum For The Cleanup of the Niger Delta. This was anchored by the very first Minister of Environment, he led the operation of cleanup of the region. Under that, they realised that Nigeria did not have any contingency plan for oil spill as at year 2000 and we have been producing oil since 1956. Of course, the oil companies, because of where they are coming from, had the national oil spill contingency plan in 1981 but somewhere along the line they stopped. In 1997, the OPTF attempted to have it, but stopped. Three years after, there was an international stakeholders workshop in Port Harcourt in year 2000 which was anchored by the minister, this was when they now began to focus on environmental management in all seriousness.
Though DPR was there, was there any national oil spill contingency plan? No. We, at the Ministry of Environment, began the remediation exercise. All the sites were attended to through bioremediation. By year 2002, we already approved for the oil companies the use of bioremediation. The bulk of it, now going on in Ogoni, is still at the lower side of the pollution. The bulk of the job is undergoing bioremediation through natural enhanced remediation. It is not that we are doing what DPR is doing, we have said that when the oil is still in the ground, it is entirely DPR but when it spills, it becomes somebody else’s problem to clean. We agreed with them that if you are doing environmental cleanup, we also need to know because we told the oil companies that if you have a spill, you must inform DPR. This is because DPR is in charge of oil production and it accounts for how much we derive from any quantity of oil produced for Nigeria. So, if you expected two million barrels per day, and for any reason, there was an incident and 500 barrels spilled away, how do you account for it?
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