Clara Nwachukwu
Three months after suspending crude oil production from its facility, Mobil  Producing  Nigeria,  operator  of the Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation,  (NNPC)/MPN Joint Venture on Wednesday announced the lifting of the force majeure it declared on May 12, 2010.

Force majeure is a legal term that frees an organisation from contractual obligations for its inability to meet agreements due to circumstances beyond its control.

Mobil experienced an oil spill on account of a pipeline leak from its Qua Iboe terminal on May 1, which was closely followed a week later by another spill, which it described as “a very minor spill” from its Yoho production platform.

However, the company could not say how much oil was spilled in both cases, except to say that it was very insignificant as to constitute environment hazzard, adding that the clean up was concluded with record time.

The Executive Director, Public & Government Affairs, MPN, Mrs Gloria E. Essien_Danner, in a statement made available to Vanguard on Wednesday, expressed “gratitude  to  all  customers, purchasers and Joint Venture partner, the NNPC for their understanding during the production outage.”
Spill controversies

The oil spill, which occurred in the wake of the controversial Gulf of Mexico, also generated its own internal controversies among host communities over compensations and environment regulators, the National Oil Spills Detection and Response Agency, NOSDRA.

While on the one hand Mobil disagreed with submissions and accounts made by NOSDRA relating to the spills, on the other hand, communities jostled to get a piece of the compensations, allegedly being offered by Mobil as a result of damages suffered from the spills.

The oil firm insisted that there is yet no proof of impact on account of the May 1 oil spill on its host communities to justify the payment of compensations and denied any association with the circulation of compensation forms..

The declaration followed as thousands of residents in the communities scrambled to purchase compensation forms from one Udo Akagha and Associates, a firm of Estate Valuers allegedly circulating the forms.