Nigeria’s Illegal Oil Refineries Pregnant with Environmental disasater
It has become a cliché that oil boom connotes oil doom in developing African countries. In Nigeria the doom is multifaceted – dependence on a single economic product, corruption in high places especially in government institutions, frequent attempts by those who do not have access to the oil largesse available to government officials to pipe-line piracy with its attendant dangers, oil bunkering, indiscriminate pollution of the environment due to frequent oil spills as a result of non-enforcement of existing regulations, and last but not the least, resort to illegal refineries which poses danger to the health of the population of the oil producing areas.
To access the full story, highlighted below is the URL to the verbatim report by Alan Taylor in the Atlantic, Jan 15, 2013.
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“Nigeria’s Illegal Oil Refineries” – Reuters
Reuters photographer Akintunde Akinleye recently gained rare access to an illegal oil refinery near the river Nun in Nigeria’s oil state of Bayelsa. There, he was able to document the secret and dangerous practice of oil bunkering, where locals hack into oil pipelines, steal the crude oil, and refine or sell it abroad. For over 50 years now, crude oil and natural gas have been extracted from the Niger Delta by large corporations, which have had their share of environmental disasters. The ongoing damage from the tapped pipes and these makeshift refineries continue to take a terrible toll on the environment and the local population. See also “Nigeria: The Cost of Oil” from 2011. [30 photos]”
