An environmental compliance expert in the United States oil and gas sector, Emmanuel Ladapo, has urged governments to prioritise scientific environmental leadership in managing existing infrastructure.
Speaking with Saturday PUNCH, Ladapo said the role of environmental oversight within energy systems represents a sustained contribution at the intersection of science, engineering, and public responsibility.
The expert, who also serves as Committee Lead for Education with EverGreen, Illinois, conservation-focused organisation, noted that there was a growing consensus within the sector that infrastructure resilience depends as much on scientific planning and effective environmental governance as on engineering innovation.
According to Ladapo, environmental compliance professionals working within energy systems argue that many of the most serious risks facing modern infrastructure do not arise from technological limitations, but from how environmental oversight is understood, resourced, and executed.
“Modern energy systems are expansive, ageing, and deeply embedded in communities,” he said. “Pipelines, transmission networks, retired assets, and waste streams rarely fail without warning. Instead, breakdowns tend to be cumulative—emerging from delayed intervention, overlooked signals, or environmental decisions treated as administrative obligations rather than strategic responsibilities.”
He added that without spatial and scientific insight, environmental oversight remains reactive by design.
“Within natural gas operations, this approach has tangible implications, as effective environmental governance must extend across pipeline distribution and transmission systems, corrosion-management programmes, construction and engineering activities, and field operations.
“Industry observers note that such environmental leadership plays an increasingly critical role in preventing infrastructure failures and protecting public health, particularly as legacy energy assets continue to age and expand across populated areas.”
Ladapo’s work focuses on identifying and mitigating risks within modern energy systems before they materialise into environmental or public-health incidents.
“With my academic training in geology and geospatial sciences, I need to emphasise that environmental risk is rarely static. It migrates through soil, water, air, and infrastructure corridors, often invisibly. Without spatial and scientific insight, environmental oversight remains reactive by design.
“Effective environmental governance also includes transmission-integrity management, PCB pipeline retirement and management, and asset-retirement activities—areas where environmental missteps can produce lasting public-health and ecological consequences.
“From my perspective, environmental leadership ultimately comes down to execution. Regulations alone do not prevent contamination or exposure. Protection occurs when analytical methods are sound, contractors are properly guided, and environmental safeguards are embedded into routine operations rather than appended after the fact,” he added.
Beyond energy infrastructure, Ladapo has contributed to “broader environmental dialogue on public-health risks affecting communities in resource-impacted regions, alongside peer-reviewed academic work examining contamination pathways, pollutant migration, and human-health risk and also served as a journal reviewer within the environmental sciences.”
Recently, the Federal Government, through the Minister of State for Gas, Ekperikpe Ekpo, said it would continue to support initiatives aligned with Nigeria’s clean-energy transition.
According to a report published by the International Energy Agency’s World Energy Employment Outlook, Nigeria could leverage the global energy transition to create an estimated 4.7m new clean-energy construction and technical jobs by 2035 across emerging markets and developing economies.
