Mapping gas flares in the Niger Delta
Gas flares, the product of the burning of combustible gas released when drilling for oil, are visible to a satellite which detects heat spots around the globe.
Their environmental and health impact is well known and understood, but their effect on communities in the remote Niger Delta area hasn’t been well documented in the past. For this reason, a group of reporters backed by Code for Africa’s impactAFRICA programme, have been engaging with citizen journalists in the region to collate their stories.
Our first step in our investigation into the health impacts of gas flaring was to use open-source data from this satellite to focus specifically on the Niger Delta region. In a joint commission with Greenpeace, we engaged the expertise of satellite mapping expert, Rory Hodgson.
Hodgson used data from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), a US government agency, and analysed the detections to ensure the data was picking up gas flaring and not just a log fire. He used previous knowledge of flaring sites to do this, then used CartoDB to build a month-by-month map which can be found here.
But this data did not only provide us with the geography of flaring sites. We used this information to verify flare-out promises made by major flaring companies.
We also used this data to find out trends in flaring since 2013 by using it quantitatively and setting it against the official NNPC (the Nigerian National Petroleum Company) figures. We extracted the NNPC figures from PDFs on their website, which was technically fiddly. Rory then made a graph charting the trends in the satellite data and comparing it to the monthly figures we extracted from the NNPC’s website. Thanks to this work, we were able to counter the current narrative around gas flaring levels in Nigeria.
We encountered a few challenges while carrying out this phase of the work: we were not able to provide exact numbers of the amount of gas emitted through flaring, only trends of whether the amount had increased or decreased. The satellite has only been recording for five years, so that gave an earliest time with which we could use that data.
Thanks to this stage of our investigation, we were able to counter the current narrative around gas flaring levels in Nigeria. We hope that when this data is released alongside our stories, it will provide evidence that not enough is being done to tackle gas flaring in the Niger Delta.
In other parts of our research, we have looked into the health impacts of gas flaring, as well as the day-to-day impact of living beside a flare. Knowing the amount of gas flared is crucial to understanding how communities have been impacted in the long and the short term and highlights the fact that although companies, the government and key stakeholders make frequent pronouncements against the continuation of routine flaring, on the ground the practice is not decreasing.
We hope to find additional data using this method of satellite mapping, by bringing it up to date again, by assessing the scale of flaring for specific companies, and offering an estimate of the amount of people severely impacted by the effects of gas flaring in the Niger Delta.
More will be revealed when our investigation is published.
Reporting for this story was supported by Code for Africa’s impactAFRICA fund.
Code for Africa (CfA) is the continent’s largest federation of data journalism and civic technology laboratories, with labs in four countries and affiliates in a further six countries. CfA manages the $1m/year innovateAFRICA.fund and $500,000/year impactAFRICA.fund, as well as key digital democracy resources such as the openAFRICA.net data portal and the GotToVote.cc election toolkit. CfA’s labs also incubate a series of trendsetting initiatives, including the PesaCheck fact-checking initiative in East Africa, the continental africanDRONEnetwork, and the African Network of Centres for Investigative Reporting(ANCIR) that spearheaded Panama Papers probes across the continent.CfA is an initiative of the International Center for Journalists (ICFJ).
