Gas flaring substantially reduced, official says

Nigeria has substantially reduced the volume of gas flared in its oilfields, a major source of greenhouse-gas emissions, in the past three years, Presidential Adviser on Petroleum Rilwanu Lukman said on Monday. When President Olusegun Obasanjo took office in 1999, 71 percent of the natural gas given off during oil production was burned off, Lukman told a conference of the Society of Petroleum Engineers in the Nigerian capital, Abuja. Since then a number of gas utilisation schemes have become operational, reducing the amount flared to 51 percent. Over the years, inhabitants of the Niger Delta in southern Nigeria, where the bulk of the country's petroleum is mined, have blamed the flaring of gas by oil transnationals for polluting the air and causing acid rain, which has significantly reduced agricultural yields. There were also allegations that some of the chemicals emitted during flaring had corroded the aluminium and zinc roofs of houses. Lukman said that, in addition to the Nigerian Liquefied Natural Gas plant in the Niger Delta island of Bonny, which processes substantial volumes of natural gas for export, other projects were being prepared with a view to eliminating flaring altogether by 2008. These include the construction of a pipeline to take natural gas to some West African countries and plans to build a trans-Saharan pipeline through Algeria to ship gas to Europe. There are also plans to set up new gas plants in Nigeria. Some of the gas was also being re-injected into oil wells to enhance crude oil recovery and further reduce the adverse impact of flaring on the environment, Lukman said.