Int’l Group Slams Shell Onshore Divestment Plan

Campaign group says supermajor must deal with oil pollution and decommissioning before leaving. It also questions the ability of buyers to deal with legacy issues, even as the Nigerian Petroleum minister gives the move a nod. Shell’s planned exit from the Niger Delta has been slammed by a Dutch non-profit organisation, which said the supermajor should not be allowed to sell its onshore assets in Nigeria until it “takes responsibility for its toxic legacy of pollution” and safely decommissions abandoned oil infrastructure.
Last month, Shell struck a deal worth up to $2.4 billion to sell its Nigerian onshore subsidiary to Renaissance, a consortium of five companies, four based in Nigeria and the other overseas.
According to Upstream, an international media publication, in a 105-page report published February 28, the Amsterdam-based Centre for Research on Multinational Corporations which calls itself Somo called for Shell to address legacy issues in its Niger Delta assets and raised questions about the ability of the buying consortium to deal with these deep-seated problems if the supermajor exits the oil-rich play as currently planned.
Following heavy criticism and demonstrations against the federal government’s planned signing of the divestment plot by Shell and other IOCs, Heineken Lokpobiri, Nigeria’s minister of state for Petroleum and Niger Delta son, unabashedly supported the divestment plan claiming the operators are still in the region.