Nigerian oil pipeline on fire
2004-12-02 17:54
Lagos - Nigerian militants have set fire to a major oil pipeline and are preventing engineers from inspecting it five days after the pipeline was reported ruptured, Anglo-Dutch energy giant Shell said on Thursday.
The 18-inch (45cm) Assa-Rumuekpe crude oil pipeline was reported to be leaking on November 27 in the Egbeda community's territory to the west of the city of Port Harcourt in the volatile Niger Delta region, Shell said.
The company's Nigerian arm, SPDC, sent an investigation team to the area but, as they began working, an unidentified group set fire to the spill while local youths chased the engineers away from the site, a statement said.
"The militants have also seized two SPDC vehicles... Rivers State Government agencies have been approached to intervene in the interest of safety of lives and the environment," the company's statement said.
Shell is the largest operator in Nigeria's oil industry, which is the biggest in Africa and the source of 2.5 millions of barrels of oil per day.
Despite the multi-billion dollar profits made by the firms and the Nigerian government in the four decades since the oil began to flow, most of the villages of Niger Delta still live without clean water or mains electricity.
Resentment against the oil companies is high and foreign firms are accused of collaborating with the heavily armed police and soldiers based at their rigs and flow stations in the brutal suppression of community agitation.
Meanwhile, tens of thousands of barrels of crude are stolen every day by sophisticated gangs of pirates, often working with corrupt officials, in a trade which has financed an arms race and fuelled ethnic militancy.