Documents show Shell has been pumping oil through Nigeria's pipeline for years

2026-06-03 08:26:00, Kosova & Bota CNA

Documents show Shell has been pumping oil through Nigeria's pipeline for

British multinational Shell continued to operate a major oil pipeline in Nigeria for years, even though it knew it was causing widespread pollution - despite a warning from its staff and its own technical standards, internal documents obtained by the BBC show.

The files, including emails and presentations, reveal that a senior Shell executive warned as early as 2008 about the risks of continuing to pump millions of barrels of unrefined fuel through one of the company's main pipelines to Africa's largest oil producer, while the latter was subject to massive and destructive uncontrolled theft and infrastructure failures.

Across the oil-rich southern Niger Delta in Nigeria, decades of oil spills have left a deeply damaged landscape, with wetlands increasingly covered in raw, contaminated sediments.

The BBC obtained the internal documents after Shell disclosed them as part of ongoing legal proceedings in the UK brought by communities living around the streams and mangroves of the Niger Delta, who want Shell to be held liable for pollution caused by more than 100 leaks stemming from the theft and illegal refining of oil between 2011 and 2013 that have damaged their health, environment and livelihoods.

The main line of the Nembe Stream, 96.5 km long, runs near the riverine community of Bille, which consists of 45 islands, from inland oil fields to a coastal processing site for export.

The pipeline, which Shell sold last year, was one of Nigeria's largest, most expensive and ultimately most problematic pieces of infrastructure. It was capable of transporting up to 150,000 barrels of oil a day, but was repeatedly hit by spills and targeted by illegal oil thieves.

In court documents, the oil firm argues that much of the pollution was caused by "large-scale oil theft, sabotage" and dozens of illegal refineries, and that its Nigerian subsidiary has invested heavily over many years to reduce the risk of spills and respond to them.

In places like Bille, which the BBC visited last week, residents describe once-rich fishing grounds as becoming toxic and unusable.

"Before 2011, this was a beautiful area. People would play here and go to the river," 64-year-old fisherman Balafama Augustus Bruce told the BBC.

A plaintiff in the case against Shell, Bruce said that before all the information leaks, he was able to catch a variety of fish, including sardines, catfish, tilapia and even oysters, but most are hard to find now or if caught, appear deformed.

"We used to fish around here. But because of the damage the spills have caused, no one is fishing here anymore."

"Because of this I have become poor. I eat from hand to mouth."

The communities, through an ongoing international lawsuit against Shell, are seeking $1 billion (£742 million), including: $250 million in compensation and $750 million to clean up environmental damage.
According to the UN, since 1958 when Shell shipped its first cargo of oil from Nigeria, at least 13 million barrels - or 1.5 million tonnes - of crude oil have been spilled in at least 7,000 incidents.
Activists have long sought to hold multinational oil firms accountable for environmental damage there - one vocal Shell critic was Ken Saro-Wiwa, one of Nigeria's leading writers, who was infamously executed by the then military government in 1995 after leading anti-pollution demonstrations in his Ogoniland region of the Niger Delta.

Oil theft has also long been a problem in the Niger Delta - known as "bunkering" and usually involves criminal gangs using pipelines to siphon crude oil into ships or storage tanks. Some of the stolen oil is refined in makeshift camps hidden in streams, while the rest is sold illegally.

In the mid-2000s, oil militants were also a major security issue, as heavily armed militants on speedboats attacked installations and kidnapped foreign workers for ransom, including a series of incidents in 2007 and 2008, as part of their demands for the impoverished region to receive more benefits from oil revenues.