2002 - 2012: 18,063 Gulf Of Guinea Oil Spills Recorded; Some Natural, Most From Oil Operations

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When BP’s Deepwater Horizon offshore oil rig flooded the Gulf of Mexico with 4 million barrels of oil in 2010, the catastrophe was headline news across the world for months. A new study of satellite images taken between 2002 and 2012 suggests that it may have been dwarfed by the amount of oil spilled into West Africa’s Gulf of Guinea in recent decades.

“There was a lot of news about what occurred in the Gulf of Mexico, which is good,” said Serge Riazanoff, one of the study’s authors and a researcher with VisioTerra, a French consultancy that specializes in satellite data assessments. “But nobody speaks about the fact that in the Gulf of Guinea it’s even worse.”

Riazanoff and his co-authors analyzed nearly 4,000 images of the West African coast taken by Envisat, a satellite launched by the European Space Agency in 2002 that recorded data across the world until it ceased functioning in April 2012. What they found when they started combing through those images to look for signs of oil spills was sobering. According to the study, researchers were able to identify 18,063 oil slicks in the 10-year period covered by the images, mostly caused by spills from shipping vessels and offshore drilling platforms.

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The worst period recorded in the study was 2008, when oil spills covered nearly 1,000 square kilometers (390 square miles) in the Gulf of Guinea over the course of the year, including around 400 km2 (155 mi2) of Angola’s coastal waters. Overall, Nigeria was far and away the most heavily affected country in the region.



Nigeria’s struggles with the environmental consequences of oil spills on shore have been well-documented, with the United Nations estimating in 2011 that cleaning up the heavily polluted Niger Delta region would take 30 years and cost billions of dollars. But less is known about the extent and severity of offshore spills — partly because the Nigerian government relies on oil companies themselves to disclose them. “By law, when oil spills, the oil companies will indicate such,” said Idris Musa, director of Nigeria’s National Oil Spill Detection and Response Agency (NOSDRA). But analysts say the Nigerian government lacks the ability to independently monitor its coastal waters on its own, and that often companies stay silent rather than risk taking a PR hit or being forced to pay for cleanup efforts.


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https://news.mongabay.com/2021/12/off-west-africas-coast-a-sea-of-oil-spills-goes-unreported/