A University lecturer, Engr Reuben Okparanma has expressed worry that for over 37 years, oil spill sites have remained unabated in the Niger Delta region of Nigeria.
Okparanma, a senior lecturer at the Department of Agriculture and Environmental Engineering, Rivers State University, Port Harcourt, made this assertion at the technical session of the monthly meeting of the Nigerian Society of Engineers (NSE), Port Harcourt, recently.
According to him, the UNEP report of 2011 conservatively estimated that in Ogoniland alone, there are over 69 petroleum contaminated sites, with an estimate of $1 billion required for hydrocarbon decontamination for the first 10 years  of the proposed 30 years period.
He said land contamination due to oil spills is a common scene in oil producing areas like the Niger Delta, and called for particle physics analytical technique as a measure, adding that it is cost-effective, rapid, non-invasive, portable  and had no ecological health risk concerns.
The university don noted that, until the mid-1980s, most underground storage tanks were made of bare steel, which he said is likely to corrode over time and allow contents to leak into the environment.
Okparanma opined that, faulty installation and inadequate maintenance procedures also  releases into the environment harmful substances stressing that, sources of petroleum hydrocarbons in the environment could arise from leaking underground storage tanks and spills of gasoline, diesel, and aviation fuels among others.
“it is often important to understand the source of the petroleum hydrocarbons on a site prior to remediation”, he stated, and further called on the Nigerian Engineers to take advantage of combining  wet chemistry and particle physics methods for the assessment of petroleum hydrocarbons in soil.
The lecturer further called on the Federal Government and engineers to key into the technological breakthrough with the advent of the “Nanotechnology”.

Collins Barasimeye