The smell of oil in the Nenets Autonomous Okrug

It is a well known fact that the Timan-Pechora oil and gas basin is characterized by an extremely vulnerable environment. For example, more than 80 percent of the Nenets Okrug's land area is tundra with permafrost. The recovering of damaged soil goes several times slower than in the southern part of the country. Moreover, 935 965 hectars or 5,3 percent of okrug's land area is categorized as specially protected nature with a great number of rare plant and animal species. The oil industry's impact on the environment of the okrug can still not be called catastrophic, like, for example, in Western Siberia, where nature mostly was polluted in the Soviet period. At the same time, according to new Russian statistics, the Nenets Okrug in 2003 was number two on the federal ranking on oil production growth. Only the Tyumen oblast has a quicker growth. Most likely, the coming year oil production in the okrug will grow even faster. Such a fast raise of industrial pressure surely is and will remain very dangerous for nature in the region. All of this is founded on the fact that the way of thinking among responsible persons has not changed much since the Soviet period.

Top secret information

Every modern Russian oil-producing company likes to say how much they care about nature protection, which measures they take to prevent damages and how much money they spend for ecological aims. For example, Lukoil, the biggest operator in the Timan-Pechora province reports that it spends more than 1 million USD every year on nature protection in the region. But the practice shows that very often this is just words. Small leakages happen on the territory of the region almost every month, while rather evident accidents take place 1-2 two times per year. And there are always cases when oil companies prefer to hide the facts from state control bodies hoping to avoid responsibility. They make information about environmental problems top secret and that itself is a great problem. The latest example is an oil spill from a pipeline belonging to the company "Severnoe Siyanie", which happened last July. One of the local inhabitants from the Khorej-Ver settlement informed the Emergency Department of the Nenets Okrug about a 10 km long oil spot on the Kolva River. Only after this the company pleaded guilty. The financial damage from the oil spill was estimated by specialists to 20 million rubles. But who is able to count the real damage to flora and fauna?

An even more scandalous case occurred in 2002 with the largest oil company of the region - "Lukoil-Komi". Because of a factory defect, a pipeline leaked oil near the Kharjaga oil field on August 17. The state authorities got informed about this accident only a month later and then not even by the company itself, but just by chance. When the commission came to the place to make necessary measurements the guards of the company didn't allow them to approach the pipeline and even stopped all video-recording of the site.

Don't worry, be happy?

The okrug Administration does not seem to worry much about the ecology of the region. Last December the okrug Assembly of Deputies rejected the 2004 draft budget of the ecological fund of the region. The rejection came after an announcement from the prosecutor's office, showing irregularities in the management of the fund. Inspections conclude that the leaders of the environmental fund have spent the fund's resources on non-environmental purposes. The prosecutor applied to the regional administration with order to return money back to fund and to call its head to account. For the year 2004 deputies are planning to allocate more than 50 millions rubles to the fund, but there is still no agreement about how to spend this money.

It should be mentioned, however, that the okrug administration recently announced its plan for the setup of several monitoring points in all major places of oil production. Special control equipment and experts will be applied. This is meant to help the administration to get information about industrial catastrophes faster. The future situation depends on the interrelation and joint policy making between oil companies, authorities and local society.

 

International focus

Many European scientists today worry about the environmental situation in the Nenets Okrug. Some of them already participate in international projects focusing on the whole Timan-Pechora territory. One of the latest evidences of this was a project presentation held on 19 December 2003 in Naryan-Mar by people from the Norwegian Svanhovd Ecological Centre. The lecture was named «How to avoid environmental contamination during development of oil production in the Russian North». The director of the project, Bjorn Frantsen, and Qno Lundkvist, a representative of the Norwegian Pollution Control Authority, described some of the factors which today are special objects of concern. First of all, there is a lack of transport infrastructure in the region. Moreover, some months every year a major part of the oil has to be transported by sea under difficult ice conditions. This has triggered worries among the Norwegians about possible accidents with Russian oil-tankers in the Barents Sea. Accidents and oil spills would affect the interests of both Russia and Norway.

By Jury Tjuljubaev, Naryan-Mar  (Photos: Econao.ru)

This is the second of two articles about the oil industry in the Nenets AO. Read part one.

BarentObserver.com, 19 January 2004