Nearly a century after plundering the Niger Delta for the black gold, fossil fuel giants have finalized plans to ditch their onshore oil fields and move drilling far into the Gulf of Guinea, where a massive haul remains untapped. This divestment, which received the nod from Nigeria’s regulatory bodies last year, would see Shell, Norwegian-owned Equinor, Italian ENI, the French-owned TotalEnergies and the US multinational ExxonMobil withdraw from the region, offloading their ageing high-emission oil wells to local payers in a massive asset sale.
Big Oil’s exit from the Delta, from which it has extracted billions of profit since crude oil was discovered there in the 1950s, has sparked protests from civic groups and villagers who have borne the negative consequences of oil exploration. On 19 December last year, protesters holding banners with slogans like ‘No Compensation, No Divestment’ converged in several towns across the Niger Delta to demand a halt to the sale. Central to their anger is the concern that the process is taking place without a commitment from Big Oil to provide compensation for decades of environmental degradation and loss of livelihood in the region.
