Peter Jones: Sticky questions require answers

The public should not be treated as the poor relations when oil companies come under scrutiny

READING yesterday's front page story in The Scotsman on the lack of information coming from Shell about its North Sea oil leak reminded me of something. It took a while to pin it down but eventually it dawned on me. It was that what Shell is telling us about this spillage puts us on a par with poor native people in Canada whose way of life is in danger of being destroyed by big oil.

I was reminded of an incident at the last annual RBS shareholders' meeting. Some representatives of Canada's First Nations (what we in more ignorant days called Indian tribes) had obtained proxy voting and questioning rights. They were there to question RBS about the bank's financing of exploration and exploitation of Alberta's tar sands, a vast deposit of sticky oil.

The First Nations believe that this work will irretrievably damage a way of life that depends on untouched forests and moorland for hunting and clean rivers for fishing, especially for salmon. They hunt and fish, not just to feed themselves, but to earn a modest income.

An area the size of England is being excavated and torn up to slake America's thirst for oil. On the way, river basins are being despoiled, forests turned into skeletal remains and marshes into toxic ponds of waste.

At RBS's Gogarburn meeting venue, they were given a microphone. Unfortunately, their spokesperson went on a bit and the shareholders got restive. I rather thought it was extremely discourteous to people who had travelled several thousand miles to make an important point in an entirely peaceful and respectful way, but eventually they were shouted down.

The reply they got was a bit of a brush-off, courteous, but a brush-off nonetheless. This appears to be what we are getting from Shell.

All along, the company has compared it to the BP Deepwater Horizon disaster in the Gulf of Mexico and pronounced it to be small, just about 100 tonnes. That appears to be absolutely true - the BP spill amounted to about 700,000 tonnes.

But that's not what BP said initially. First the Deepwater Horizon disaster was causing a leak of about 1,000 barrels a day, then it was 5,000 barrels, then maybe 12,000 until eventually it turned out to be 62,000 barrels a day (to roughly convert to tonnes, divide by seven).

In the North Sea, the UK Department of Energy and Climate Change (DECC) yesterday upped Shell's figures to maybe "several hundred" tonnes. How long do you think it will be before it gets up to 1,000 tonnes, maybe more?

It is still small. But it is also the worst spill on the UK continental shelf for ten years. Now I am not naturally hostile to oil companies, big or small. They do an important job. Without the product they suck out from under land and sea, our society would quite literally grind to a halt. We need their oil.

But we also need oil companies to regard us not just as consumers of their products, but as concerned citizens whose rights should be respected. It is our land and our seas that get messed up if they make a mistake or are just simply casual about the way they conduct their business.

It is not just RSPB Scotland which is concerned about the potential threat to birdlife from a slick (described by Shell as a less harmful-sounding sheen) which, at 18 miles by three or 54 square miles at one point, does not sound all that small. We are too. So when RSPB Scotland ask for information and hear nothing, it is also we who are being told nothing.

Shell has form on this issue. Earlier this month, it was ordered to spend perhaps $1 billion over the next 30 years to clean up the Niger river delta in Nigeria, much of it poisoned by God knows how many thousand tonnes of oily sludge from a myriad of spills.

I accept that Shell is not responsible for all of these spills, many of which were caused by local people and rebels against the Nigerian government attacking their installations. But Shell was also pretty complicit with a regime, desperate for oil revenues, which treated the Niger delta people abominably not least in its 1995 execution of Ken Saro-Wiwa for not much more then non-violent protest against the destruction of the people and their land.

Nigeria is probably the worst chapter in the history of the oil industry and Shell has gone a long way to make reparations and clean up its act. What is happening now in the North Sea may be absolutely minute in comparison, but it is because of Nigeria and other similar episodes that oil companies are regarded with suspicion.

And because oil companies are rich and powerful, needed by governments for the wealth and tax revenues they produce, that there is also widespread suspicion that government are all too ready to cosy up to them. Alex Salmond and his government is no exception to such doubts.

Scottish environment secretary Richard Lochhead was at pains to say yesterday that his officials are thoroughly engaged in monitoring developments. He demanded that Shell and DECC make information available openly, transparently and regularly. Quite right, and that should apply to the Scottish government too.

This is not a blame game, hunting out the guilty people. It is important for the oil industry, as it continues to supply our needs, that it is seen to be open and honest about what it is doing prevent spillage damage to the environment, for it is only when that climate prevails that companies such as Scotland's Cairn Energy can expect to operate undisturbed. Cairn is exploring for oil off the western coast of Greenland. Its activities have already attracted vocal and active protest, both at its platforms in the icy north and at its offices in Edinburgh. The potential damage to the environment there that could be caused by an accident cannot be under-stated.

While Cairn has set in place measures to prevent that happening, it is still regarded highly sceptically, and will always be by those who think it is time to end our oil dependency.

But if meantime it is to operate with greater acceptance, all oil companies need to show they have abandoned secrecy and that nasty errors are being no longer hidden away.

One black sheep tars the whole flock.