When the blessing resource ‘oil’ curses

Oil industry has impacted both economy and ecology of oil-producing states in the Niger Delta region in Nigeria. The environmental detriments caused by gas flaring and oil spills develop violent ethnic agitations, through long lasting history area of conflicts, for economic, social, political, and environmental rights. This paper examines the history of oil and gas exploitation, in Niger Delta region, and its role to cause environmental degradations in the region. The study argued that multinational oil corporations’ activities were the first intriguing violence in local communities based on environmental approach. Also, the paper indicates that the conflict had many drivers related to different components of indigenous people. The tendency of violence escalated over time, in strength of acts from demonstrations and grievances to militant operations, and demands from self determination to justice, revenues equity and environmental rights, in order to reshape oil-bearing communities’ old motivations about self-governance.

Understanding Niger Delta’s violence from a World-Ecology perspective

The conflict in the Niger Delta region (Nigeria) has become one of the most environmentally and humanly devastating contexts on the African continent since the 1960s. The network of different actors involved in this context forms a complex web in which multiple and asymmetrical dynamics and interactions can be identified. From Jason Moore’s World-Ecology perspective (2015), the article suggests that this complex interaction should not be understood as a mere postcolonial episode in the context of globalisation, but as a historical network of relations. This network, in which human and extra-human natures are intertwined, is key to understanding the process of capital accumulation in the region and the resulting capitalogenic violence since the 16th century. Against this background, the article also attempts to counter the tendency to interpret violence and social resistance in the Niger Delta region as mere criminal phenomena or from narratives such as the “resource curse” that has simplified the multidimensionality of violence. In this sense, the paper analyses the different forms, strategies and meanings through which local resistance movements have tried to safeguard and re-appropriate their livelihoods and the commons in recent decades in the face of the growing presence of multinational oil corporations.

Oil Industrialization in the Middle East

The building of the global oil industry in the Middle East served as the occasion for one of the largest political projects of technical and economic development in the modern world. Scholarship has long associated an abundance of natural resources such as oil with autocracy in the Middle East while overlooking the sociotechnical ways in which oil operations were built with political consequences for the shape of the state and the international oil corporations. The early period of oil development was marked by oil abundance up to World War I, when demand for oil started to increase rapidly with the invention of the internal combustion engine. The cheapest source of production was in the Middle East. From the perspective of the largest transnational oil corporations to emerge in this period, the energy system needed to be built in a way that demand and overabundance were managed. Oil industrialization enabled the production and large-scale consumption of this new and abundant source of energy but was also connected with striking oil workers and controlling or blocking processes of industrialization in rival sectors such as the coal and the chemicals industries. In the first three decades of the 20th century, the process was made possible through the building of an international oil economy that took the form of production quotas and consortium agreements to restrict new oil discoveries in the Middle East. Oil industrialization projects intensified after World War II due to a flood of petrodollars into OPEC countries such as Iran and Saudi Arabia. Rising oil revenues and sovereign control achieved through oil nationalization triggered the execution of five-year development plans of industrial and infrastructural expansion. The birth of environmental activism in the 1960s–1970s coincided with the end of oil abundance and the fear of the planet’s destruction, spurring the passage of legislation to place limits on the hydrocarbon economy in which the machinery of oil industrialization had thrived.

Despoliated Ecosystem and the Exploited Woman: Victims or Volunteers? A Reading of Kaine Agary’s Yellow-Yellow

The horrendous situation in the Niger Delta region of Nigeria is gradually producing a rich and enduring literature, which paints a vivid picture of the trauma of living in that part of the world. Playwrights, poets, dramatists and literary critics have all lent their contributions in a determined effort at speaking up against the enormity of the environmental degradation in the region; a tragedy brought about by the insensitive exploitation of the region’s natural resources by multinational oil corporations. This study seeks to examine Kaine Agary’s perspective towards the problem as captured in her fictional work, Yellow-Yellow, with focus on the heavy toll it takes on the woman. The dilemma of being caught in the web of either a victim or a volunteer, compels the woman to either dependency or independence. Thus, the paper concludes by making a case for economic independence and argues that it is the surest security for women, especially, the Niger Delta woman.

RESTORATION OF WATER BODIES POLLUTED WITH REFINED PRODUCTS USING EXTENDED GRAPHITE SORBENT

Oil and its distillation products play an important role in human life. In the process of distilling oil, we get important products for the life of a modern person. It is hard for a person to live without gasoline, diesel fuel, lubricants and polymeric materials. The chemical industry is also heavily dependent on oil. Oil production makes a significant contribution to the economy and at the same time causes significant damage to the habitat of humans and animals. Nowadays the oil production process may cause oil spills into the upper soil layers and water bodies. Also, the likelihood of accidents during the production, transportation and distillation of oil is not excluded. Most accidents occur due to corrosion of pipes, which are not always inspected and replaced in due time. Each pipeline has its own service life, oil companies are required to monitor the condition of pipes, valves, etc. It is necessary to create special commissions to control the transportation routes. It is always better to prevent an accident than to clean up the spill and clean the environment from pollution products. Unfortunately, the leaders of large oil corporations do not want to replace pipelines in time, trying to save some material resources. As a result, animals, birds and inhabitants of reservoirs die. Not only adult representatives of the animal world can die, but their embryos, they are very sensitive even to a small amount of oil and its products. Animals listed in the Red Book are dying. Every year more and more representatives of flora and fauna suffer from human mistakes. Some species are on the verge of extinction. A man in pursuit of technological progress ruins his habitat. A large number of oil fields are located at the bottom of reservoirs, as a result, we have oil spills during production at the bottom and surface of the reservoir. The effect of these processes on fish is almost always lethal. Birds, during migration, are also exposed to the detrimental effects of oil spills. Oil contaminates their feathers and enters the respiratory tract. As a result, contaminated feathers do not allow to continue the flight.

Crafting Spaces of Value

This ethnographic investigation of the rise of the artisanal oil refining industry in the Niger Delta, Nigeria, shows how oil infrastructures have become contested between the state, multinational oil corporations and local youths in what I call a ‘new oil frontier’. I argue that artisanal refineries are indicative of the politics of crude oil governance and reveal complex, integrated and innovative forms of extractive practices by youth groups within many Niger Delta communities. Using the example of the Bodo community in Ogoniland, where local youths operate refineries constructed with local materials and technology, I show that such refineries represent an emergent form of energy capture that transforms the creeks of the Niger Delta into islands of carbon sale and challenges state and corporate power.