Shell Games: Oil Slicks, Exploding Death Boats, and the Whistleblower They’d Rather You Forget

Here we go again. Shell—the ethical oil behemoth that brought you climate chaos, fiery floating gas factories, and ocean-wide slicks the size of small countries—is under fire once more. And what do you know? It’s not just a fluke or a rogue pipe. It’s a pattern. A very expensive, very dangerous, and very preventable pattern of catastrophic negligence—and the people trying to stop it keep getting burned. Literally and professionally.

The Bonga Spill: “Oops” Doesn’t Quite Cover It

Let’s rewind to December 2011. Off the coast of Nigeria, Shell’s pride and joy, the Bonga FPSO (Floating Production Storage and Offloading vessel), decided it was time to vomit 40,000 barrels of crude oil into the Atlantic. Over 685 square miles of shimmering disaster followed, making it one of Nigeria’s worst spills in a decade. Shell took hours to stop the leak after their crew noticed that more oil was disappearing than arriving. Genius.

Nigerian regulators, clearly unimpressed, slapped Shell’s Nigerian arm (SNEPCo) with a $3.6 billion fine. Shell, naturally, is appealing. Because why pay for poisoning the ocean when you can pay lawyers to fight the bill?

Eleven Years Later, Same Bonga, Same Bomb

Fast forward to 2022, and surprise! The exact systems that failed during the Bonga spill were still broken. A confidential internal safety review (that Shell would no doubt prefer buried under the rig floor)...

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