Nigeria Burns an Opportunity

The nation would like to process its gas reserves into the liquefied form. Instead, the ‘flaring’ of excess fuel — and health fears — have risen.

Plans to end the environmentally damaging practice of burning off unused natural gas by oil companies in Nigeria are being stymied by funding problems amid pressure to increase oil production, industry officials and environmentalists say.

Nigeria is committed to ending “gas flaring” by 2008 as part of its attempt to find commercial solutions for gas produced with oil pumped from the Niger Delta region. But levels of so-called associated gas flaring have been rising again in recent years.
Flaring levels in Nigeria are widely recognized as being higher than anywhere else in the world. Friends of the Earth, an environmental group, estimates that Nigerian flaring causes more greenhouse gases than all of sub-Saharan Africa combined. The giant orange flares that burn across the delta region, where most of Nigeria’s oil is produced, cause respiratory diseases and premature deaths, and pollute croplands close to village homes in the delta’s vast network of swamps and creeks.

Environmental groups estimate that Nigeria burns off almost half its 5 billion cubic feet of daily production because of a lack of gas-gathering networks. Edmund Daukoru, Nigeria’s minister to the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries, said that associated gas flaring in Nigeria had risen in absolute levels over the last two years. Royal Dutch Shell, Nigeria’s largest oil producer, says it saw its absolute levels of associated gas flaring increase to 728 million cubic feet daily in 2004 from 570 million in 2002.

LA Times