Oil leaks contaminate area of 7,000 to 8,400 sq km in western Siberia

Oil leaking from western Siberian pipelines has contaminated an area of virgin land seven times larger than Moscow, according to Dutch environmental group IWACO. IWACO experts say it will take centuries to restore the ecology of the now-uninhabitable area, which measures 7,000 to 8,400 sq km and is concentrated around the Samotlor oil field in the Khanty-Mansiisk region.
IWACO, a company established in 1969 to provide independent environmental consultancy services, conducted the research for Greenpeace. "These dead forests are really a dreadful landscape," said Oganes Targulyan of Greenpeace in Moscow. "There are no animals and birds there. The odd dragonfly that enters the polluted zone soon drops dead."

A report that IWACO released this month says the concentration of oil by-products in soil around the oil field is between five and 50 times above permitted standards. Half the region's rivers designated for fishing are polluted with oil by-products, and fish caught there contain carcinogenic hydrocarbons in alarming quantities.
Evaluating the ecological damage around the pipelines is not easy, as oil companies hire private guards to chase people away, according to Greenpeace. To measure the poisoned area, IWACO used site photographs from space.
IWACO's survey revealed that in the last five years, cancer morbidity in the affected Tyumen region towns of Nizhnevartovsk, Langepas, Megion and Raduzhny has doubled, and is 30 % to 40 % higher than in neighbouring regions. Samotlor's 12,000 km of worn-out pipelines now burst 10 times a day on average, according to Greenpeace. It is the largest out of a number of oil fields in the region that are blamed for the pollution.

In December 2000, the State Duma's ecology committee revealed Russia loses 17 mm to 20 mm tpy of oil, or up to 5 % of total extraction, due to pipeline leakages. As of 1997, the Samotlor oil field has belonged to Tyumen Oil, or TNK. According to the company, the 650 sq km of polluted land around this oil field aremostly the legacy of the Soviet regime.
"Those who saw how barbaric oil extraction was at Samotlor before we took over were just gasping with surprise," said a TNK spokeswoman. She said IWACO and Greenpeace are over-dramatizing the situation, and that the region's ecology is gradually improving. "Now, we are preparing a project of ecological enhancement for Samotlor," she said.