Alame v Shell: High Court allows Niger Delta claimants' 'all-spills' causation case

The High Court has ruled that claimants in the long-running Niger Delta oil pollution litigation against Shell Plc and Renaissance Africa Energy Company (formerly the Shell Petroleum Development Company of Nigeria) may advance a broad "primary" causation case alleging liability for all oil spills across the Bille area between 2011 and 2013, including spills that have never been individually identified.

Handing down judgement in Alame & Ors v Shell Plc & Anor [2026] EWHC 2332 (KB), Mrs Justice Lambert rejected the defendants' argument that permission was required to plead the wider case, and indicated that she would have granted permission in any event had it been necessary.

The litigation, which follows the Supreme Court's 2021 jurisdictional ruling in Okpabi v Royal Dutch Shell, concerns crude oil contamination of water sources and mangrove forests said to result from systemic failures in the defendants' pipeline and infrastructure operations. Case management has repeatedly turned on the adequacy of the claimants' pleaded causation case, with the Court of Appeal ruling in December 2024 that it would be wrong to impose a case management regime predicated on the claims being treated as "global" or "all or nothing" claims.

Following that ruling and subsequent disclosure, the claimants served an amended pleading setting out both a "secondary" case, based on 106 individually identified spills, and a "primary" case contending that any damage not attributable to those identified spills should be inferred to have resulted from further, unidentified spills caused by the same systemic failures, including inadequate leak detection and record keeping.

Shell argued that the primary case represented an impermissible departure from assurances given earlier in the litigation that the claimants would plead specific, identified spills, and that the Court of Appeal had proceeded on that same understanding. It further argued that an undifferentiated claim left it without a clear target to defend, risked circumventing limitation defences applicable to earlier spills, and ignored the different legal regimes governing pipeline and non-pipeline infrastructure.

Mrs Justice Lambert found that the claimants' case had not materially changed, noting that counsel had referred to systemic, region-wide failures in submissions long before the amendment, and that the Court of Appeal's judgement had expressly acknowledged the possibility that some damage could not be linked to a specific identified spill. She held that the resulting claim did not amount to a global, all-or-nothing case of the kind considered problematic in earlier authority, since findings on some categories of spill could still support liability even if others failed.

On the question of fairness, the judge concluded that the forthcoming liability trial, which will examine each of the 106 known spills in detail from May 2027, would give the defendants a substantial evidential platform on which to contest the wider inferential case, and that limitation and regime-specific issues were fact-sensitive matters properly resolved at trial rather than grounds for striking out the amendment at this stage.

The judgement also addressed a separate application to plead aggravated damages based on allegations that the defendants pursued their earlier jurisdictional challenge in bad faith and destroyed disclosure material. Although the defendants did not dispute the claimants' entitlement to bring the claim, they sought to defer any evidence on the point to the quantum phase of the trial. The judge instead granted permission for the issue to be dealt with during the liability trial, citing the risk of delay to the overall timetable and the overlap between witness credibility findings in the liability phase and the aggravated damages allegations.