Aiteo substantially puts Nembe oil spill under containment

Floods community with truck-loads of relief materials

AITEO EASTERN EX PLORATION AND PRODUCTION COM PANY (AEEPCO) has substantially contained the oil spill at its Oil Mining Lease (OML) 29 wellhead at Nembe. Bayelsa, Andrew Oru, the company’s global group director coordinator, informed, at the weekend.

The OML 29 wellhead in Santa Barbara south field, which Aiteo jointly owns with the Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation (NNPC), had blown up on November 3, in what is seriously suspected to be sabotage by oil thieves. The wellhead is being pumped with chemicals to contain further leakage.

“I can tell you authoritatively that the pressure of the well has been substantially diminished already because all the chemicals needed to put the pressure under control are being fed in continuously and the pressure has started going down. This spill is a special type. It’s not just an oil spill, it’s a gas blowout, for whatever reason. There are two stages in containing it. The first one is to stop the gas leakage, while the second is to fill the well. It is the gas leakage that engenders and creates room for some droplets of oil to escape with gas,” Oru explained.

According to Oru, speaking during a tour of the facility with reporters, the spill was of a special type – a gas blowout – which involved 80 percent gas and 20 percent crude oil.

The tour took two-pronged dimensions — helicopter aerial view and patrol boats along the waterways around the vicinity. It was easily observed that the oil spill has been minimal, showing that it has been effectively contained.

“This is contrary to the impression that the entire environment has been seriously polluted. It is a spurious claim that the leak spilled two million barrels of oil into the creeks. The well’s production capacity, including its total reserves, was nowhere near two million barrels,” the Aiteo global group director coordinator explained.

He said thus: “The talk of two million barrels of oil spilling from the well is spurious. Two million barrels is about two supertankers. The oil would have spread over the entire country. The reserve of the well itself is nowhere near two million barrels.”

The AEEPCO director assured the Nembe community people that everything was being done to prevent humanitarian or ecological disaster due to the spill.

Aiteo, a six-year Nigerian indigenous oil company, has been complaining for long now that over 70 percent of its NCTL has been severely damaged, which further puts pressure on the company to stay strong despite all these.

The well is a gas well, with 80 percent gas and about 20 percent oil, the reason, Oru stated, it was, relatively, easy for the company to contain the amount of oil that spilled out.

“Ordinarily, if what is coming out now were oil, I can imagine that we will be needing Noah’s Ark by now,” Oru stated, noting that the heavy vegetation of the area by which oxygen was emitted in large quantities, and which flowed freely as well had also helped to absorb gaseous emissions. “Critically, the pressure of the gas that is coming out has been almost completely extinguished and in one or two days maximum, I believe we will proceed further to begin the wellkill process.”

Meanwhile, Aiteo has so far donated five truckloads of palliatives, including food and medical supplies to Nembe community. The items, which included, 10 cows, 500 bags of rice, 500 cartons of noodles, 500 cartons of water, 500 tubers of yam, 200 cartons of toilet rolls, 200 cartons of milk, 200 bags of gari, 200 cartons of tin tomatoes, 100 cartons of beverages and 100 cartoons of vegetable oil, 100 knorr cubes, 100 bags of salt, 100 bags of soaps, jerry cans of palm oil, six digital thermometers, four blood pressure machines, two blood-sugar testing kits, 150 packs of Coartem brand of anti-malaria drug, five cartons of Dettol disinfectant, 40 mosquito nets, vitamin C tables, and fully equipped first aid boxes, were received by the community’s leaders, and were stored in the Opu Nembe Town Hall for onward distribution to fishing communities directly affected by the spill.

Ori Ekpeleyai-Oruwari, the chairman of Opu-Nembe council of chiefs, who spoke on behalf of the Nembe monarch, the Amanayanbo of Opu-Nembe Kingdom, expressed delight at the donations. He said he received the relief materials for the wellbeing of the community’s residents for the second time.

“For those who are directly impacted in the oil spillage from OML 29 at Santa Barbara, we are indeed very grateful to Aiteo for bringing this relief materials to us,” he said.