Can Shell Shed Its Dirty Past?

The oil giant wants to be a player in cleaner energy. But it has a Nigeria legacy to scrub

- Kelly Gilblom

Perched in a helicopter sweeping over the mangrove forests of the Niger Delta, a photographer named Casey is looking for trouble. And she finds it, down among a cluster of tree trunks stained with crude. A faint disturbance in a jungle clearing turns out to be a group of men pawing at a pipeline, a tiny slice of a 1,200- mile web that feeds Royal Dutch Shell Plc’s bustling export hub on Bonny Island. Some of the men flee as the chopper closes in, but most redouble their efforts as Casey aims her camera. “I’ve seen things get better,” she said before takeoff. “Then they go back to getting worse.”

Casey’s paid by Shell to catch fellow locals in the act of tapping or sabotaging the patchwork of pumps and pipes that have turned Nigeria into both a major oil supplier and a leading polluter. But though she’s under Shell’s umbrella, the photographer isn’t comfortable providing her last name. That’s understandable. The Anglo-Dutch giant’s operations have been the source of conflict since the 1950s, when it drilled the former British colony’s first commercial well. That ushered in an era of spills that have ravaged fishing and farming communities— exacerbating corruption and anger among tribes in the delta, a region the size of Ireland that’s home to some 30 million people.

A Small and Shrinking Contribution

Shell’s daily oil and gas production, in barrels of oil equivalent