I'm disappointed that opinion writer didn't declare his interest

An opinion piece entitled "Cost of basin clean-up raises eyebrows" in the Daily Nation, of July 12 authored by one Prof Philip Mwabe in which he raised various issues against Kenya Pipeline Company’s ongoing cleanup exercise in Thange in Makueni, cannot go unchallenged.

I wish to draw the attention of Kenyans to the fact that a company by the name Environmental and Combustion Consultants (ECC), which is closely associated with Prof Mwabe, moved to court on March 7, 2016, seeking an order to quash the decision by the KPC to award the cleanup tender for the oil spill to Enviroserv Waste Management on the basis that the process was irregular.

On May 20, 2016, ECC lost the case. The court ruled that the KPC would have been negligent had it not taken immediate measures to remedy the problem.

I am disappointed that Prof Mwabe, a respected environmental consultant, did not declare his interest in this matter before raising his concerns with the way the KPC has handled the cleanup. Nonetheless, just like any other Kenyan, Prof Mwabe has every right to voice his concerns on a matter of public interest such as this one and it’s in this vein that I elect to respond, his subjectivity notwithstanding.

One critical question that emerges with regard to this spillage is whether it was an instantaneous leak or the pipeline had been leaking for a long time. On May 12, 2015 at 1845 hours, a KPC staff noticed evidence of petroleum products near River Thange at what was estimated to be KM 253 of the Mombasa-Nairobi pipeline. This was reported to the KPC’s Nairobi Terminal Control Centre and immediately, an emergency response team was dispatched to the scene, arriving at 1930 hours.

The leak point was soon after identified as KM 256 and the pipe section isolated at 2022 hours by closing the isolation valve. It was established at this point that the spill was emanating from a corrosion-assisted two-inch crack on the pipeline. The leak had started as a pinhole and progressed to a 2-inch crack, mainly because of the highly pressurised pipeline.

The KPC’s Systems Control and Data Acquisition was able to detect the pressure loss in the pipeline. The defect was successfully repaired by 0825 hours on May 13, 2015.

RECEIVED REPORTS

However, in spite of the fact that a cleanup was done at the site following the pipeline repair, the KPC received reports in June, 2015 that the product had been seen approximately 30 metres away from the pipeline in Thange.

An extensive investigation found out that the earlier damage to the pipeline at KM 256 discovered in May 2015 could have released significant amounts of petroleum product from the pressurized pipeline due to the high flow rate. This resulted in the product soaking into the ground, leading to accumulation in the underground soil, and subsequently the porous rock. This is how the accumulated product found its way into the shallow underground water including River Thange.

By the time the cleanup exercise was commencing in March 2016, an estimated 225,000 litres of the product had been lost and this was calculated based on the point at which pressure loss was detected in the pipeline to the point when the line had been depressurised to facilitate repair.

Since EnviroServ Kenya started the cleanup exercise in March. A total of about 18,000 litres of the product has been recovered and all this has been re-injected back into our system.

How much is the KPC going to spend on this critical exercise? Prof Mwabe and other experts in the oil and gas sector know that oil spill cleanups are very complex and protracted. This is why the KPC sought the services of a hydrogeologist to carry out an environmental mapping exercise to determine the cleanup strategy.

This is how SGS, a Nema-approved world leading inspection, verification, testing and certification laboratory, came on board, after which EnviroServ Waste Management, an international company with an impressive track record in waste management, was sourced.

Being the first such oil spill in the country, we had to rely on international experience and advanced technical know-how to help us restore the Thange environment fully.

The cleanup exercise, scheduled to take about a year, will cost the KPC about Sh117 million exclusive of taxes, which is less that 10 per cent of the erroneous figure of Sh1.6 billion that Prof Mwabe was talking about. He should have checked the facts instead of dismissing Thange as a place of no known economic activity.

Dr Joe Sang is the managing director of the Kenya Pipeline Company; [email protected].