Offsetting Flares

To the residents of Little Rock, Arkansas, news of Friday's earthquake near Blackpool would not come as a surprise. Shale gas extraction there was halted in March after 800 earthquakes in six months, including the strongest in 35 years, caused some bright spark to realise that perhaps forcing millions of gallons of water into the ground in order to fracture the rock might not have had the best impact on the region's seismic activity. Undeterred by this and evidence that the fracking process poisons water supplies, the chairman of the Energy and Climate Change Committee of the House of Commons, Tim Yeo, last month declared concerns about the safety of fracking to be "hot air" and recommended that extraction proceed.

The case against fracking is obvious and has been made eloquently in the film Gasland and numerous articles. However nobody has yet made the connection between the renewed interest in natural gas in the United States and Europe and the bizarre wastage of natural gas in oil producing countries, particularly Nigeria. Natural gas is a byproduct of crude oil extraction, however since extraction began in Nigeria in 1958 Shell has deemed the gas unprofitable to collect and market and therefore simply burns it off. This means that in many parts of the Niger Delta gas flares have been burning continuously since the 1960s.

The amount of natural gas that has been wasted in this way is astonishing. In fact according to the World Bank gas flaring in Nigeria emits more greenhouse gases into the atmosphere than all other sources in Sub-Saharan Africa combined. While the majority of the residents in the Niger Delta live without electricity, in 2005 alone emissions equivalent to 17.8 million cars were belched out of the flares which are often quite literally on their doorstep.

And this is not just a case of wasted potential. Friends of the Earth estimated that from 1970 to 2006 the gas flares cost Nigeria $80 billion in "environmental, economic and social consequences," in addition to the $70 billion they could have gained from selling the gas. A large proportion of this figure is the impact on health, as the pollution released from the flares has been proven to cause increases in cancer and respiratory illnesses, including 120,000 additional asthma attacks in Bayelsa State alone. Furthermore the flares keep many villages in a state of constant illumination. Ken Saro-Wiwa, the Nigerian environmental rights activist wrote "while nature gives the eskimos six months of daylight followed by six months of night, Shell-BP has given the Dere people about ten years of continous daylight."

The wasted gas from Nigeria's flares could supply a full 25% of Britain's energy needs. Using even a fraction of this would eliminate the need to gamble on the extremely risky extraction of shale gas in the UK, whilst simultaneously improving the quality of life of millions of people in the Niger Delta.