Every link in the chain of oil production, from exploration through consumption, generates profound damage to local communities and their environment. These communities and the environments around them are often subject to seismic explosions and forest clearing during exploration, the production of toxic drilling muds and waste waters while drilling takes place, and then routine gas flaring during oil extraction. Oil spills from pipelines, tankers and tank farms and deadly dioxins from refineries round out the industries’ deserved polluting reputation.

Environmental and Health Impacts from Oil

Typically, in the exploration phase of oil production, forests are cleared for seismic lines and then dynamite is detonated just below the surface. From 1988 to 1998, over 15 million kilometers of lines were cut, resulting in significant biodiversity loss in sensitive ecosystems such as rain and cloud forests of the Amazon and the mangroves of the Niger Delta.

At the extraction phase of oil production, waters and drilling muds contaminated with heavy-metals, acids and known carcinogens have often been dumped into fresh waterways or placed in open pits, often only thinly lined with vinyl. These pits can sit for dozens of years, leaching toxins into the soil. In the Ecuadorian Amazon, Texaco deforested 2 million acres, spilled 16.8 million gallons of crude oil and dumped 30 billion gallons of known carcinogens and toxic wastes onto the land and into rivers and streams over a 30-year period ending in 1992.

A Harvard Medical School study identifies impacts from many aspects of oil production:

• Oil extraction has wide ranging impacts, including crude oil released directly into the environment, occupational fatalities, worker exposure to chemicals, contaminated sediments and fish from offshore oil production, spills, explosions, and fires, and chronic impacts on animals and humans from operational discharges.
• Oil transport impacts include spills and leaks, which cause environmental damage and harm to wildlife, particularly in developing countries where there are fewer regulations and inadequate enforcement. Coastal communities and marine mammals also experience significant impacts from spills and leaks.
• Oil refining creates chemical, thermal and noise pollution and affects the health and safety of refinery workers and nearby communities and ecosystems.
• Gasoline and many of its additives are toxic and are associated with some types of cancer, with oil industry employees and those living near refineries, transfer and storage facilities at greater risk. Lead in gasoline in the developing world also presents a great risk.
• Air pollution is created from gas flaring at the point of extraction, from additives and products to oil combustion, and from chemical and particulate matter released in the air.
• Combustion of oil creates acid rain that harms human health and ecosystems and increases greenhouse gases leading to climate change.

Responses to Oil and Gas Impacts

In response to the widespread impacts of the oil and gas operations on the environment and local communities, and the clear opportunities to upgrade facilities and procedures on the ground, industry groups, international financial institutions and some environmental organizations have developed various ‘best practice’ guidelines for the oil industry to follow, with emphasis on operations in fragile ecosystems. These sets of mostly voluntary guidelines have made some contribution to raising the bar of acceptable environmental and social standards for oil and gas operations.

However, while the ecological damage of any individual project may be lessened, the overall impact of a series of projects often remains severe. In addition, the best practices strategy of minimizing oil impacts continues to centre on how a project can be carried out, without a meaningful consideration of whether it should be implemented at all in light of the foreseeable ecological, social, cultural, and climate consequences.

In this way, best practice guidelines, as currently conceived and implemented, represent the promotion of a relatively limited set of technological innovations and social strategies that, while individually important, all build off a prior decision to go ahead with a given project. In nearly all cases, project approval by the host government and oil corporations lacks a sufficiently comprehensive evaluation of the long-term impacts of the project.