Some firms prospecting for oil and gas are improperly disposing of hazardous waste as a result of weak monitoring, a new report suggests.
The 'State of Environmental Monitoring of the Upstream Oil and Gas Sector' was launched on Tuesday in Nairobi.
It says that despite government agencies mandated with periodic monitoring, the checks are irregular.
“The remote location of most oil and gas fields complicates periodic monitoring because most relevant government agencies in those areas are understaffed and under resourced,” according to the report.
The report was produced by conservation lobbies WWF and the Kenya Oil and Gas Working Group.
The 60-page report says the discovery of oil and gas in Kenya led to increased interest in the four petroleum exploration basins: Lamu Basin, Anza Basin, Mandera Basin and Tertiary Rift Basin.
The National Oil Corporation of Kenya said that to date, more than 86 wells have been drilled, mostly in the Tertiary Rift Basin.
More than four billion barrels of crude oil reserves have been found in the Lokichar sub-basin by Tullow PLC and its partners, with recovery oil estimated to be 750 million barrels.
Helping to prepare the report were the National Environment Management Authority, Energy and Petroleum Regulatory Authority (Epra), the Turkana and Kisumu county governments.
Present at the launch were Nema principal compliance officer Selelah Okoth, Kajiado Assembly Speaker Johnson Osoi, Kenya Oil and Gas Sector Steering Committee's Ashioya Biko and WWF Kenya representative Jacqueline Kimeu.
“The agencies therefore rely on self-monitoring reports by the developers. Occasionally, multi-agency teams undertake joint inspections of oil and gas facilities,"the report read.
Biko said there are inadequate human resources in lead agencies to help efficiently monitor oil and gas exploration.
Okoth said though many strides have been made, there is a challenge in the sector. She said Nema has done a lot of capacity-building.
“Nema already has a functional petroleum desk with staff and budget allocations every year. Capacity development for the staff is ongoing," she said.
The report was supported by the Norwegian Agency for Development and Cooperation (Norad), the World Wide Fund for Nature Norway and WWF Kenya.
The new report presents a state of the environment report for environmental monitoring of the oil and gas sector.
It was commissioned by WWF Kenya to identify potential gaps and weaknesses in national monitoring frameworks.
Specifically, the report reviews environmental monitoring reports of petroleum projects, gaps in the analysis of monitoring and enforcement and the status of environmental plans in the country.
It was prepared by a team of multi-disciplinary experts.
The report urges the government to allocate more resources to lead agencies to undertake monitoring according to their mandates.
In active oil and gas counties, the report says government should enhance the human resources and increase the technical capacity of institutions to undertake regular monitoring, the report read. It says good baseline data is necessary.
It reports data is available across agencies. However, data sharing remains a challenge due to institutional bureaucracy. It calls for investment in a common database compiling data from different sectors, and making the database accessible to government regulatory agencies and other users.
The different institutions mandated with monitoring need to strengthen their collaboration, according to the report.
(Edited by V. Graham)
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