Cleaning up the oil spill mess in the Niger Delta with insights from the contaminated land regimes in the UK and the US

The current global trend towards a transition to renewable energy, the drop in oil prices, tougher climate regulations and pressure on oil industries to reduce their carbon footprints have forced the industry to reassess the commercial viability of their producing fields. In the North Sea, the common strategy is to maximise recovery and profits from mature fields, and to decommission oil asset installations. In the Niger Delta, however, multinational oil companies, for the most part, sell their onshore and shallow-water fields with diminishing outputs, and move offshore where harvests are bountiful with minimal disturbance from the Niger Delta "militants" and local communities. These sales are usually made to small indigenous oil companies. The major issue that emerges is how to deal with the clean-up liability for pre-existing oil spills. Some of these spills have accumulated in the Niger Delta for more than 40 years and are from multiple pipelines owned and managed by different operators. This situation, coupled with lack of reliable spill data, makes apportionment of clean-up liability much more complicated. In this article the author will seek solutions to this problem by drawing insights from UK/EU laws on contaminated land, the US CERCLA/Superfund and the UK regime on oil infrastructure decommissioning.