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TODAY, the oil trader Trafigura and its law firm Carter Ruck found themselves uncomfortably in the limelight after a failed attempt to prevent The Guardian newspaper to report on proceedings in the British parliament. British media were subject to a gagging order to prevent them reporting details on Trafigura and its alleged involvement in the dumping of toxic waste in the Ivory Coast. 

The court injunction was to prevent the media from publishing a question concerning “the publication of the Minton Report on the alleged dumping of toxic waste in the Ivory Coast commissioned by Trafigura".

The Minton report has now been widely leaked on the internet and has also been seen by tce. However, tce has also been served with a court injunction by Carter Ruck preventing it from publishing any of the details in this report.

We were however able to put some of the facts already in the public domain to process and safety experts in IChemE. Our report, published in the current issue of our monthly magazine, follows below.

THREE years ago, 16 people died and 100,000 suffered a variety of health effects in Abidjan, the Ivory Coast’s most populous city. A UN investigation recently suggested that the episode was probably linked to the dumping of 500 t of toxic slops in open-air dumps and watercourses from a ship belonging to the world’s third-largest oil trader. The trader, Trafigura, maintains that the waste could only have caused temporary, flu-like symptoms, and has settled claims
out of court.

The story begins in late 2002. Mexico’s state refiner Pemex overhauled its Cadereyta refinery to process heavier crudes but didn’t install a unit for reducing high levels of sulphur and silica in its refining byproduct, coker gasoline. To correct the problem, Pemex briefly attempted to process it through its hydrodesulphurisation units but soon gave up because the process affected other parts of the plant.

As Pemex was unable to pump coker gasoline through pipes linking Cadereyta to other refineries in Mexico and the US, it stored the product in on-site tanks, but after 30 months of build-up it ran out of storage capacity so searched for a buyer. Enter Trafigura.

In early 2006, Pemex trucked approximately 84,000 t of coker gasoline to Brownsville, Texas, where Trafigura loaded the cargo aboard a chartered Panamanian tanker, the Probo Koala. The ship would later drop anchor near Gibraltar and serve as a makeshift processing plant.

The desired final product was a sellable naphtha blendstock. To get there, Trafigura had to solve the same quandary that confounded Pemex: how to strip out the sulphur. Trafigura could have paid a refinery to do it but internal emails seen by tce show that the company instead used its own cheaper experimental caustic washing process, where coker gasoline is simply mixed with a caustic solution.

Toby Chancellor-Weale, secretary of IChemE’s Oil and Natural Gas Subject Group, tells tce that this isn’t as unfeasible as it sounds: “You could do [caustic washing] with two buckets in your kitchen. It would make an awful lot of mess and get very smelly but the point is the process can be as sophisticated as you chose it to be.”

The exact conditions of the onboard process remain hotly contested. Steve Coates, refinery expert at Petrofac Engineering Services says: “[The reactants] need a good contact. I’d assume they’d have a proper reactor and contactor. I assume they didn’t just stick caustic [soda] on top as it wouldn’t mix.”

Trafigura sold the cleaned naphtha for a reported £12m ($19m) profit and then turned its attention to the waste.

John Atherton, secretary of IChemE’s Safety & Loss Prevention subject group, tells tce: “Refineries used to wash with caustic soda back in the bad old days but it’s a really dirty old-fashioned process.”

Today, only a limited number of facilities can responsibly handle the resulting sulphurous waste, and proper disposal is expensive. Trafigura offloaded the slops at Amsterdam port for treatment but balked at the price quoted by a waste treatment company, so the waste was pumped back onboard.

Atherton says the waste resulting from caustic washing is very difficult to dispose of. “Not all the caustic will have been converted to sulphides. The result is a reactive liquid aqueous solution – an organic soup that can contain anything from sodium hydroxide to sodium sulphides and phenols. It’s a very hazardous waste.”

According to its International Chemical Safety Card (ICSC), sodium hydroxide causes serious skin burns when touched directly and burns the lungs when inhaled. Contained in the caustic washings would be sulphurous compounds that the process was designed to remove from the coker gasoline. In engineering circles, this process is said to ‘sweeten’ the fuel because it removes extremely foul-smelling mercaptan compounds that are added to natural gas to alert people to leaks. Exposure to this family of molecules can result in nausea, headaches, and respiratory problems.

The exact profile including the concentration of the waste is highly contentious but accepted by all is the fact that come mid-August 2006, the slops had been shipped to Africa and ended up being dumped in more than a dozen open air sites around Abidjan where a portion of the population makes money by sifting through landfill waste.

IChemE ChemEnvoy Greville Williams says: “If the dumped sludge still contained high concentrations of mercaptan gum that could not be processed then it is possible that it would give off hydrogen sulphide and this could cause breathing difficulties and possible fatalities.”

THE ICSC card confirms this view, listing a range of possible effects beginning with irritated eyes and ending in unconsciousness and death. tce invited Trafigura to reply but the company was not available for comment.

The rest of the story is documented by the popular press. Okechukwu Ibeanu, the UN Special Rapporteur for toxic waste reported earlier this month that the 500 t of slops dumped around Abidjan resulted in 16 deaths and visits to hospitals by tens of thousands of locals complaining of burns, nausea and headaches. He said that as of August 2008, the site had not been decontaminated and continued to pose a health risk to locals. Trafigura describes the report as defamatory and maintains that the blame lies with the subcontractors it paid to handle the waste: “[Trafigura] recognises that the slops had a deeply unpleasant smell and their illegal dumping by [subcontractor] Compagnie Tommy caused distress to the local population.”

The directors of Tommy were arrested shortly after the incident and in 2007 Trafigura paid an out-of-court settlement of $198m to the Ivorian government, which exempted it from further prosecution by the state.

Further to this it settled a $50m UK class action settlement earlier this month with a law firm representing 31,000 Africans that suffered minor flu-like illnesses. The company doesn’t accept liability and the law firm has publicly accepted the results of an independent analysis of the contaminated sites: “Both the Judge and the Claimants’ own legal team fully endorsed Trafigura’s long-maintained position that the Probo Koala’s slops simply could not have caused deaths, miscarriages, stillbirths, birth defects or other serious or long-term injuries. This followed thorough analysis by 20 independent experts in what has been by far the most detailed consideration of these matters anywhere in the world.”

Others still believe that Trafigura is guilty, that it has contravened EU landfill and waste export laws. Greenpeace is currently pressing the Dutch authorities to prosecute Trafigura for manslaughter and grievous bodily harm.

The story continues.