Indorama Eleme Petrochemicals Limited (IEPL) says it is committed to protecting the environment and ensuring compliance with global best practices in its operations.

Indorama’s Head of Corporate Communications, Dr. Jossy Nkwocha said this on Monday, January 31, 2022, while conducting journalists on a tour of its facilities at Eleme in Eleme Local Government Area of Rivers State.

The fertilizer producer stated that its facilities were not emitting “any dangerous gas into the atmosphere,“ explaining that Indorama has “a closed system and this closed system does not allow any strenuous gas to escape. And as they have explained to us in the control room, we buy this natural from either Agip or TotalEnergies and we don’t allow it to waste by flaring”.

Dr Nkwocha further explained that the essence of the facility tour was to give the Media the opportunity for an on-the-spot assessment to ascertain the environmental compliance level and integrity of its facilities, noting that though officially “nobody has mentioned Indorama as having contributed to soot, but because of insinuations here and there, we invited journalists to come and see for themselves”.

“We have made presentations to show that we have taken adequate measures to see that we don’t emit any soot whatsoever, and from your (journalists) observations, you can see for yourselves that there is no soot whatsoever.”

“Indorama is an open book; that is why we have taken you to all areas of our operations – in petrochemical, fertilizer, control rooms, to see for yourselves that we don’t allow any extraneous gases to escape into the air. Everything is monitored through the latest equipment to ensure that no dangerous gas escapes into the atmosphere in whatever form.”

He debunked insinuations that the company was implicated in the soot debacle affecting the State, pointing out that the company was instead contributing to the nation’s economic growth through fertilizer production in an environmentally friendly way and in line with global best practices.  

“What it means is that we don’t contribute in any way to soot. Rather, we are helping government to produce fertilizer for farmers, we are helping Nigeria to produce petrochemicals for industries.

 “We have 7,000 full time workers and contractors. They come here every day; so, there is employment of more than 7,000 persons. If you extrapolate it by their family members and others, you could see the number of persons.

“We supply fertiliser to about 32 million farmers. We have also told you we supply Urea to blending plants and each of them may employ about 100 persons. So, Indorama is helping so much in creating jobs.

“We have two major products: petrochemical and fertiliser. The petrochemicals are the engine room of Nigeria’s industrialisation. Without those things, we will be spending so much money to import petrochemical and because we are producing in Nigeria, the country is saving so much money. So, we are doing what they call import substitution.”