Our guest blogger is Kiley Kroh, associate director for Ocean Communications at the Center for American Progress.

After numerous accusations of Royal Dutch Shell covering up its oil spills in Nigeria, a landmark study released today by the United Nations Environment Program (UNEP) found that cleaning up five decades of spills in the region could require “the world’s most wide-ranging and long term oil clean-up exercise ever undertaken.” The highly anticipated report estimated that the damage wrought by Shell, by far the largest operator in the region, and other companies in the Niger Delta will cost an initial $1 billion and could take up to 30 years to complete.

UNEP’s analysis found that most of the oil spill sites the companies claim to have cleaned up are still highly contaminated and that emergency measures be taken to warn communities. The report identifies several severe public health and environmental threats – including soil contamination reaching more than five meters deep in many areas and, in Nisisoken Ogale, “researchers found 8cm of refined oil floating on ground water that served community wells.” Shell was ejected from the communities in 1994 for widespread pollution, but oil spills have continued to occur “in alarming regularity.”

The announcement comes on the heels of yesterday’s revelation that Shell would accept responsibility for two massive oil spills that have devastated a Nigerian community of 69,000 in the Ogoniland region and completely destroyed their livelihoods. According to the Guardian, experts who studied video footage of the spills estimate their combined impact could be as large as the 1989 Exxon Valdez disaster, which spewed nearly 11 million gallons of oil into the Alaska coastline, and could take at least 20 years to clean up. Shell has previously maintained that less than 40,000 gallons were spilled.

The spills occurred in 2008 and 2009, contaminating a large stretch of rivers and waterways, and no attempt has been made to clean up any of the oil. A statement from the oil giant, however, claims that “SPDC (Shell Petroleum Development Company of Nigeria) has always acknowledged that the two spills which affected the Bodo community, and which are the subject of this legal action, were operational…SPDC is committed to cleaning up all spills when they occur, no matter what the cause.”

With oil built up on creek sides and washing in and out with the tide, the impact on this fishing community has been catastrophic. Despite Shell’s acknowledgement of liability, their response to the Bodo people has been “insulting”:

According to the communities in Bodo, in two years the company has offered only £3,500 together with 50 bags of rice, 50 bags of beans and a few cartons of sugar, tomatoes and groundnut oil.

This from the company that just last week announced second-quarter profits of $8 billion, a 77 percent jump from the same period a year ago, bringing their total profits in the first six months of 2011 to an astonishing $14.9 billion.

The implications of Shell’s actions in Nigeria extend beyond the region alone. The president of Royal Dutch Shell’s U.S. operations is increasingly confident that the company’s proposal to drill in the harsh Arctic will be approved as early as 2012, despite a top Coast Guard officer’s recent testimony asserting that the U.S. government is not prepared to respond to a spill in Arctic waters. An oil spill in the untested Arctic is far more likely than any other place in the world, and the oil giant’s disdain for the Nigerian people does not bode well for the Native Alaskan communities that stand to be devastated by a spill.

Wednesday, Shell claimed responsibility for two oil spills dating back to 2008.  And these are not your run of the mill destructive oil spills — they are estimated to exceed the 11 million gallons spilled in the Exxon Valdez disaster. Until yesterday, Shell had claimed less than 40,000 gallons had been spilled in Nigeria … off by a factor of 275.

The claim comes after years of class-action lawsuit from the people of Bodo in Ogoniland, a region in the Niger Delta of Southern Nigeria.  Shell could be facing hundreds of millions of dollars in fines.

The trouble with oil in Nigeria started in 1956, when oil was first discovered. (See the Guardian for a history of oil in Nigeria).  How devastating has the oil industry been to Nigeria?  As a 2010 article by  the Guardian’s environment editor explained:

With 606 oilfields, the Niger delta supplies 40% of all the crude the United States imports and is the world capital of oil pollution. Life expectancy in its rural communities, half of which have no access to clean water, has fallen to little more than 40 years over the past two generations….

It is impossible to know how much oil is spilled in the Niger delta each year because the companies and the government keep that secret. However, two major independent investigations over the past four years suggest that as much is spilled at sea, in the swamps and on land every year as has been lost in the Gulf of Mexico so far.

One report, compiled by WWF UK, the World Conservation Union and representatives from the Nigerian federal government and the Nigerian Conservation Foundation, calculated in 2006 that up to 1.5m tons of oil – 50 times the pollution unleashed in the Exxon Valdez tanker disaster in Alaska – has been spilled in the delta over the past half century. Last year Amnesty calculated that the equivalent of at least 9m barrels of oil was spilled and accused the oil companies of a human rights outrage.

According to Nigerian federal government figures, there were more than 7,000 spills between 1970 and 2000, and there are 2,000 official major spillages sites, many going back decades, with thousands of smaller ones still waiting to be cleared up. More than 1,000 spill cases have been filed against Shell alone.

While we are often focused on spills on American soil, from Alaska, to Montana, to Florida, to the proposed tar sands pipeline, we cannot forget that oil is a global problem — a problem that requires a global push for renewable energies solution.

–Tyce Herrman