World Bulletin / News Desk

Nigeria was on Friday urged to re-open investigations into 89 oil spills in its southern delta region, after claims that Shell and ENI misreported the causes.

A total of 46 spills came from pipelines operated by Shell's local subsidiary, the Shell Petroleum Development Company of Nigeria, and 43 from ENI's Nigerian Agip Oil Company, it added.

The call was made after crowd-sourced analysis of the companies' publicly available documents on pipeline failures in the Niger Delta in the last seven years to December 2017.

Activists who pored over reports found that since Shell began publishing details in January 2011, it had 1,010 spills amounting to 110,535 barrels or 17.5 million litres of crude.

ENI had 820 spills -- the equivalent of 26,286 barrels or 4.1 million litres of oil -- since it made its reports public in 2014.

The companies blamed "third party interference" -- either sabotage of pipelines by militants or the theft of crude known locally as "bunkering" -- for most of the spills.