In their costliest and longest campaign in Russia to date, Greenpeace environmentalists were set to break camps along the Ob River in western Siberia on Friday, where they will test soil and water for traces of pollution and attempt to clean up 100 metric tons of crude oil spilled along the pipelines there.
The aim of the protest is to persuade French oil giant TotalFinaElf to invest in the maintenance of the corroded, leaking pipelines used by its main Russian suppliers and to clean the existing spills that are polluting the Siberian taiga, Martijn Lodewijkx, a Greenpeace representative, said in an interview this week.
Around 30 Greenpeace activists from Russia, Germany, France and the Netherlands plan to collect samples of soil, water and food to establish the pollution levels in the area. Experts from two independent Dutch oil consulting companies f Hague-based Iwaco and Moscow-based Tebodin f will help with the research, Lodewijkx said.
TFE does not extract oil in Russia, but annually buys as much as 18 million to 20 million tons f out of the 130 million tons exported yearly f from local producers, said a TFE department head who asked not to be named.
Greenpeace will camp near pipelines used by Tyumen Oil Co., or TNK, outside the city of Nizhnevartovsk. TNK is one of TotalFinaElf's few long-term Russian suppliers, the TFE official said.
An official at TNK said the company sells TFE about 70 percent of its export.
Greenpeace plans to gather the oil in imitation oil-transportation vehicles and deliver it to its "legitimate owner" at the end of the campaign in four weeks.
The TFE official called Greenpeace's idea for the French company to invest in maintaining its suppliers' pipelines "ridiculous."
"We are paying for the final product. How it is produced is a problem for the Russian companies and the environmental officials to resolve."