No abstract

The global economy relies heavily on oil and gas resources. However, hydrocarbon exploitation projects can cause significant impacts on the environment. But despite the production of numerous Environmental Impact Statements (EISs) to identify/mitigate such impacts, no study has specifically assessed the quality of EISs for both onshore and offshore oil and gas projects, with tested hypotheses. To address this research gap, our paper, for the first time, develops a modified Lee and Colley evaluation model to assess the quality of 19 sampled oil and gas project EISs produced from 1998 to 2008 in Nigeria. Our findings show that Project Description and Communication of Results are the main areas of strength. However, Environmental Impact Prediction, and Project Decommissioning, were among the key areas requiring attention. A key finding, though, is that Mann-Whitney tests suggest that there is no evidence that the quality of EISs for the latter period (2004-2008) is higher than that of the earlier period (1998-2004). We suggest that periodic systematic review of the quality of submitted/approved EISs (c. every 3-5years) should be established to monitor trends in EIS quality and identify strong and weak areas. This would help to drive continual improvement in both the EIA processes and the resultant EISs of technical engineering projects. Such reviews have the potential to illuminate some of the underlying problems of, and solutions to, oil and gas exploration, production and transportation, and their related environmental impacts. This suggested change would also be useful internationally, including for the burgeoning exploration and production of unconventional hydrocarbon resources.

The deliberate damaging of oil pipelines (interdiction) is a key problem in the global petroleum industry and tends to have a strong spatial identity. It also has local, national and international implications for energy security and susceptible environmental receptors. This paper specifically focuses on Nigeria, a country often affected by complex environmental problems associated with oil and gas activities. Partly because Environmental Impact Assessment (EIA) in Nigeria was only promulgated in 1992, there has been no specific study of pipeline interdiction and how it could be better addressed in future EIAs, especially at river crossings where oil pollution is usually significant. Therefore through a careful collation of data from different sources, this paper for the first time aims to: (1) evaluate how pipeline interdiction has been addressed in sampled EIAs; (2) assess interdiction trend per unit of pipeline length over a 16-year period; (3) identify points on pipeline river crossings that are especially sensitive to oil spills. A linearly-weighted equation was used to estimate interdiction per 1000 pipeline kilometres per year. River network and pipeline shapefiles were geoprocessed in ArcGIS 9.2 to identify river crossing locations and the spatiotemporal trend of interdiction was plotted. Key findings include: (a) high interdiction rates per 1000 pipeline kilometres ranging from 1.4 to 735 per year; (b) at least 115 pipeline river crossing locations exist in Nigeria and constitute potential oil-spill hazards; (c) these hitherto unavailable pipeline river crossing data unsurprisingly show the majority of such locations are within southern Nigeria. These results should guide future oilfield developments, including oil production and transportation facility projects, through efficient scoping and mitigation strategies. We argue that there is a need for systematic requirements to effectively address the anticipation/mitigation of future pipeline impacts in EIAs to better support oil spill contingency planning and reduce environmental problems.

HAL is a multidisciplinary open access archive for the deposit and dissemination of scientific research documents, whether they are published or not. The documents may come from teaching and research institutions in France or abroad, or from public or private research centers. L'archive ouverte pluridisciplinaire HAL, est destinée au dépôt et à la diffusion de documents scientifiques de niveau recherche, publiés ou non, émanant des établissements d'enseignement et de recherche français ou étrangers, des laboratoires publics ou privés. Distributed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives| 4.0 International License Trend and variability in a new, reconstructed streamflow dataset for West and Central Africa, and climatic interactions, 1950-2005