Cancer Alley: Shell profile

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Shell also operates a chemical plant and a refinery in Norco, Louisiana, in a predominately African-American community known as “Cancer Alley.” Seven workers were killed in a 1988 explosion at the refinery. The flares from the refinery burned so bright after Hurricane Ida in 2021 that they could be seen 25 miles away.

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Royal Dutch Shell is a fossil fuel exploration company. In the Niger River Delta, the company was responsible for an average of 2,976 spills a week between 1976 to 1991, on the land of the Ogoni people. The Ogoni say that Shell was behind the hanging of nine Ogoni activists fighting Shell, including poet Ken Saro-Wiwa. In Durban, South Africa, Shell is a part-owner of the South Africa Petroleum Refinery, where rates of leukemia are 24 times higher than the national average and children suffer 4 times the respiratory problems.

The company was a major target of anti-apartheid boycotts in the 1980s over its role in supporting the white South African government with fuel and money but just 192 rand ($22) in annual rent for two petrol stations on Umnini tribal land in KwaZulu-Natal, where blacks were not allowed to own land.

(See the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency's Enforcement and Compliance History Online for Shell's plants in Geismar and Norco - here and here. Note that auto-display of data from this link may be disabled for some browsers. If so, copy the URL manually into a new browser window to see it.)

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Shell is the major operator of the Athabasca Oil Sands project in Alberta, whose waste ponds are some of the biggest human-made structures on Earth. In a landmark ruling in 2021, a Dutch court ordered Shell to reduce its carbon emissions by 45 percent by 2030. Shell has also come under fire for building a vast new $6 billion ethylene ‘cracker’ plant in Potter Township, Pennsylvania, to make polyethylene plastic pellets, which have been heavily criticized for causing water pollution.

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To learn more about Shell, see the CorpWatch Gulliver profile here. A complete list of CorpWatch's Cancer Alley profiles may be accessed here.