Transportation In Nigeria's Oil and Gas Industry: An Environmental Challenge

The Nigerian Niger Delta has in recent years remained a national and international focus for diverse stakeholders not only for its enormous oil and gas resources but for environmental sustainability, wealth/revenue sharing controversies, civil unrest, and poverty of its inhabitants. To this effect, many innovative individual, corporate and/or joint-government commissioned research projects have been carried out to address the situation. Also, there have been a number of reported cases of interdiction problems (i.e. sabotage or vandalism) along pipeline infrastructure which is one of the key sources of pollution in the area. However, from the Transport Geography perspective (i.e. distance, accessibility, spatial interaction and land use), little work has been done to critically assess individual sources of environmental pollution such as pipeline infrastructure operations within the context of post-project appraisal phases of Environmental Impact Assessment (EIA) protocols or Environmental & Social Impact Assessment (ESIA). This paper identifies some significant limitations in EIA/ESIA protocols in such environments, and proposes a number of improvements to minimize oil industry environmental impacts. In particular, this paper attempts to lay the foundations to enhance EIA/ESIA and reduce the impacts of environmental pollution by (a) the inclusion of GIS and remote sensing, especially for post-project appraisal of pipeline operations and (b) integrating concepts from transport geography models.