Babatunde Anifowose

A systematic quality assessment of Environmental Impact Statements in the oil and gas industry

The global economy relies heavily on oil and gas resources. However, hydrocarbon exploitation projects can cause significant impacts on the environment. But despite the production of numerous Environmental Impact Statements (EISs) to identify/mitigate such impacts, no study has specifically assessed the quality of EISs for both onshore and offshore oil and gas projects, with tested hypotheses. To address this research gap, our paper, for the first time, develops a modified Lee and Colley evaluation model to assess the quality of 19 sampled oil and gas project EISs produced from 1998 to 2008 in Nigeria. Our findings show that Project Description and Communication of Results are the main areas of strength. However, Environmental Impact Prediction, and Project Decommissioning, were among the key areas requiring attention. A key finding, though, is that Mann-Whitney tests suggest that there is no evidence that the quality of EISs for the latter period (2004-2008) is higher than that of the earlier period (1998-2004). We suggest that periodic systematic review of the quality of submitted/approved EISs (c. every 3-5years) should be established to monitor trends in EIS quality and identify strong and weak areas. This would help to drive continual improvement in both the EIA processes and the resultant EISs of technical engineering projects. Such reviews have the potential to illuminate some of the underlying problems of, and solutions to, oil and gas exploration, production and transportation, and their related environmental impacts. This suggested change would also be useful internationally, including for the burgeoning exploration and production of unconventional hydrocarbon resources.

A distributed, scalable and provenance-enabled data access protocol for spatial data infrastructure

This paper proposes a new model for data access and sharing within a spatial data infrastructure. Spatial data infrastructure, often proposed at national level, refers to the enabling of wider access to geographical data so that better knowledge can be generated to promote social, environmental and economic benefits. A good spatial data infrastructure includes people, policies, tools, methods and data. Many national spatial data infrastructure projects have included a clearing house, where meta-data can be searched in order to discover digital resources. While this approach can have certain advantages, there are also problems. Particularly the centralised clearing house has been shown to be hard to realise. In this paper, instead of a centralised top-down approach, we advocate a scalable, bottom-up distributed approach as the core of a spatial data infrastructure and demonstrate its feasibility. The advantage of this approach is that the spatial data infrastructure can grow organically without the need of a centralised entity and thus access to spatial data can be achieved sooner bringing with it environmental and economic benefits. We show how quality and security can be maintained within the approach. The National Geospatial Data Infrastructure (NGDI) project of Nigeria, together with the application area of environmental impact analysis, is used as a case study.

Integrated Ocean Observing Systems as a source of scientific information for supporting oil spill response – From Gulf of Mexico to Gulf of Guinea

ABSTRACT As of 2013, the Gulf of Guinea produces about 5.5 million barrels of oil per day – more than 60% of the total daily crude oil production in sub-Saharan Africa. Potential oil spills and the...