30 October 2007
opinion
Lagos — A research conducted by scientists at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in the United States in 2003, revealed that electricity generated by nuclear reactors in USA costs 60% more than electricity generated by coal-fired or natural gas-fired plant.
To build a 1,000 MW of electricity capacity from nuclear resource, it will take another 500 MW of energy from fossil fuels to process the raw material-uranium. So, while the nuclear reactor does not emit GHG, the processing of the uranium its basic raw material does.
Under the present international safeguards, a country which does not have nuclear weapons can legally acquire nuclear reactors, uranium enrichment plants and nuclear fuel processing plants.
Another great disadvantage associated with this technology is the disposal of highly radioactive over-burdens or waste. It ranks among the most dangerous materials known to mankind. Exposure to it causes cancer and birth defects. Every single barrel of crude oil or unit of gas drilled has a significant proportionate impact on its environment.
The rapid expansion of oil and gas drilling operations in the world represents a heavy brunt on the environment and its dwellers. The flattening of land to construct well pads and clearing of hundreds of dirt roads to access remote drill sites dump a lot of sediment into waterways-an effect that deteriorates by storm runoff.
Without exception of any country, wherever crude oil is found it must be drilled by that government either in the short or long run, and the dwellers in that area will be relocated to another place, and if it is in a country with good leadership, some other monetary compensation will be attached to the re-settlement exercise.
In the Niger Delta area of Nigeria, for instance, the local community residents control the surface of their lands, or at least claim to be owners, but the government often manages the riches in the earth below, and the rights to develop them can be leased to private companies who have secured the required imprimatur from government's appropriate agency.
The affected ethnic groups are Andonis, Edos, Effiks, Gokanas, Ibibios, Ijaws, Ika Ibos, Ikweres, Itsekiris, Isokos, Kalabaris, Urhobos and Ogonis.
Surface owners of the lands always try to negotiate difficult conditions and restrictions with industry representatives, but they are always outwitted. Oil and gas drilling in Nigeria is consistent with playing a complicated board game without being told the rules.
Oil industry always succeeds at running over people who do not know the rules. In the Niger Delta, once-peaceful communities and neighbourhoods in the yesteryears are now industrial sites, invaded by oil drill rigs, concrete well pads and networks of busy access roads. Oil and gas industry operators do not respect environment, sacred lands and reservation places.
It has fragmented wildlife habitat and inundated pastures with groundwater. Oil and gas development has dumped pollutants into the air, shrouding vistas in haze and increasing the risk of lung damage and other health problems for nearby residents.
The gas boom has also brought hydraulic fracturing uncomfortably close to the region's supplies of clean drinking water.
Most companies keep their particular 'recipes' for hydraulic fracturing fluids secret, but many are known to contain toxic chemicals intended to increase the efficiency of the process. Fracturing clearly contaminates drinking water to the hilt. The local community dwellers are boxed in on two sides by gas flares and roaring stacks.
They contact diseases from waterborne pathogens. Distance negates responsibility. Multinational oil and gas corporations, not only in Nigeria, are headquartered in faraway cities, from where they extract the local wealth, leaving the aggrieved local communities with cracked foundations, contaminated creeks, soils with high PH concentrations derived from accumulated chemical leakage into the ground rendering the soils unfit for agriculture, poisoned wells, and steep slopes that pour down mud when it rains.
Oil and gas operators are typically driven by the profitability embedded in the layers of the industry, and this informs their decisions for undermining the known externalities inherent in the technology. Between 1970 and 1982, 1,581 incidents of oil spillage were documented in Nigeria.
Multinational oil and gas corporations always call governments' bluff and get away with it since aristocrats and nobles of the world have stakes in their activities.
Tampering with science bordering on sensitive issue like climate change is as good as destroying the foundation of the world's democracy, future and existence.
The ExxonMobil oil spill of January 11, 1998, which occurred at Idoho Platform in Akwa Ibom State of Nigeria spewed over 40,000 barrel of crude into rivers, creeks and farmlands. Similar spills due to corrosive pipelines that have outlived their life span frequently spew crude oil into the environment, with severe effect on biodiversity.
Nigeria should adopt a Bill called Hydraulic Fracturing Safety Act to limit the toxic contents in fracturing fluids to non-toxic products to stop polluting water in Niger Delta. All infrastructure, social amenities and befitting compensation schemes should be made available for owners of the degraded lands where natural resources are tapped.
Oil and gas operators should be stopped by constituted legislation from dumping liquid waste into water to avoid marine pollution and the accompanying hazard it may pose to people in such environment.
Nigeria needs industries that do not pollute, consumers who do not waste, multinational corporations that will be attuned to the rhythms of the natural world.
Our culture, economy, technology must be squarely transformed so as to fit into the ecosystem of which they are a part. Instead of bequeathing a poisonous legacy of pollutants that are bioactive and never decays, we shall imbibe a matchless conservation found in nature, where waste does not exist, and where one organism's refuse is another's best food.
Nigeria's electricity needs could be met, while simultaneously reducing GHG through a combination of increased energy efficiency and renewable energy resources (solar, wind, biomass and geothermal etc.) and advanced coal-fired plants with carbon capture and storage and high-efficiency natural gas turbines. Variable output technologies will not only stem the tide of planned and un-planned rolling black-outs, but will abrogate Nigeria's submission to the unsatisfactory conventional energy technologies.
It takes intelligence, no non-sense blend of technology, proactive policy implementation and effective leadership to achieve successful energy supply and environmental protection in Nigeria. The Federal Government has defaulted by allowing the oil companies to dump wastes in a manner that would be illegal in Europe and North America. In the US, environmental regulations do not allow the discharge of produced water or drilling mud from onshore facilities into surface-water bodies but produced water has to be re-injected for recovery or injected into disposal wells, while drilling mud are to be landfilled.
But in Nigeria waste are directly dumped into fresh water without government raising eyebrows. All hands should be on deck to solve the problems of externalities of conventional energy technologies in Nigeria.
- Okeh, Executive Director of Green Earth Preservation Charter (GEPC), wrote in from Lagos
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