The leading Russian oil company, Rosneft, is currently under investigation by the Prosecutor’s Office on the Russian island of Sakhalin for a large oil spill which occurred last week.
Sakhalin is in the North Pacific Ocean and is Russia’s largest island lying close to Japan. The island has a long controversial history of oil exploration which has been developed since the 1940s. Once such project is Shell’s highly contentious Sakhalin 2 project, where the oil giant was forced to hand over its controlling stake a decade ago.
Greenpeace also said that the spill was a worrying sign of rusting and ageing infrastructure, which the oil companies such as Rosneft have little incentive to look after, especially given the low oil price.
Greenpeace argues that due to dilapidated pipelines, the Russian oil industry spills around 30 million barrels of oil a year – this is 7 times higher than the emount spilled juring BP’s Deepwater Horizon spill in 2010 in the Gulf of Mexico.
— source priceofoil.org