Russian smelting company Norilsk Nickel (Nornickel) is an infamous name– which conjures up the image of the 29th of May 2020, when the Ambarnaya River, located near the city of Norilsk on the Siberian Taymyr peninsular, ran red. A Nornickel tank had spilled over 20,000 tonnes of diesel oil, leading to the contamination of over 20km of waterways and layers of oil up to 20cm thick– the largest ever oil spill in the polar Arctic. Greenpeace Russia estimated that the costs incurred by the damage were in excess of 10 billion rubles (£100 million).

The cause of the spill lies in numerous health and safety violations within Russia’s petroleum industry. After the Norilsk incident, calls for an official government investigation led to findings in March 2021 uncovering 3626 violations of industrial safety requirements within the industry. Testament to the lack of transparency and accountability among these polluting companies is the fact that Nornickel did not even inform local officials about the 2020 spill, who instead found out several days later via the media.

Coupled with the harmful environmental impacts of fossil fuel production are the human costs, affecting those inhabiting the local region. Nornickel is the main employer in the closed city of Norilsk in the arctic– despite the closure of their nickel factory in 2016, the city is also home to a copper factory and a metallurgical plant. According to studies, children living in the vicinity of Norilsk’s copper factory are twice as likely to experience ear, nose and throat diseases than those living elsewhere in the Krasnoyarsk region. Additionally, children’s’ risk of blood diseases, problems with the nervous system and bone and muscle illness are all over 25% higher in Norilsk than elsewhere in the region. Life expectancy is also 10 years lower than the Russian average. However, due to the locals’ financial dependence on Nornickel for employment, there is little that can be done to complain about these conditions.

There are signs of greater levels of accountability within Russia’s fossil fuel industry, but there remain many crucial changes that still need to be made. After the 2020 disaster, Nornickel was required to pay full compensation for the resulting environmental damage, amounting to roughly 250 billion rubles (£2.5 billion) - the greatest fine for environmental damage in Russian history. The resulting government audit (see above) led to 219 administrative cases and a wave of fines totalling 15 million rubles.

Regular audits and financial sanctions are a step, but Greenpeace Russia called for greater transparency at the outset to demonstrate what the risks are, and for a faster phasing out of fossil fuel use. Transparency is a particular problem in the context of Nornickel– the city of Norilsk (and many others in Russia) is what’s known as a closed city– special permission is required for non-Russian nationals to travel in and out, and the city is inaccessible by road to the rest of the country. This makes international scrutiny of activities in Norilsk incredibly difficult. A Greenpeace investigative expedition to the site of the oil spill faced numerous restrictions on sampling by Nornickel, but researchers were still able to establish that the spill had spread further than what the company had claimed. Norilsk’s remoteness has also restricted the ability for local people to hold the company to account, as indigenous activist Sidor Chuprin has highlighted that there are no environmental activists based on the peninsula.

On a wider level, this case study reveals how easy it can be for fossil fuel companies to conceal their unsafe and environmentally damaging practises, and how it often takes large-scale disasters to raise awareness of these issues, which is too little too late.

As early as 2015, it was raised at one of Nornickel’s public meetings that in Norilsk, air concentration of the carcinogenic substances nickel and benzopyrene had exceeded national threshold limits. Despite the closure of Norilsk’s nickel factory, the adverse health effects of this pollution will continue long into the future. With the copper plant still in operation, copper concentration (which was 45.9% above the limit in 2015) will continue to stay high. It is imperative that the extractive industry places a higher premium on the effects on local and indigenous communities.

By Lily Clarke

Lingering Consequences of the Fossil Fuel Industry - A Look into Russia’s Norilsk Nickel