A report published in recent days by two European environmental NGOs has raised the alarm at the international level about a project by the French oil giant Total. The two NGOs have warned of potentially unacceptable damage caused by a controversial project involving the French oil giant TotalEnergies and China's National Offshore Oil Corporation (CNOOC).
The two companies signed a $ 10 billion deal earlier this year to develop Ugandan oil fields on Lake Albert and ship the crude through a 1,445-kilometer pipeline that arrives to the port of Tanga, in the Indian Ocean, in Tanzania.
In practice, it is a pipeline that will be over 1,400 kilometers long. And the promoters of the project boast that it will be the longest heated pipeline in the world. Why heated? It will be heated to 50 degrees because the oil in Uganda is too viscous and therefore they need to heat it to liquefy it and pass it easily through the pipeline. So it's a climatic aberration.
NGOs accuse oil companies of failing to implement adequate measures to safeguard communities and the environment.
Lake Victoria, but also Lake Albert, where the oil drilling will take place, are sources of the Nile, so the impacts go far beyond Uganda and Tanzania. And unfortunately, what the experts who have shown Total's social and environmental impact studies have studied tell us that there will certainly be leaks and spills, and Total has not yet implemented adequate measures to prevent these spills.
Total company was denounced, in October 2019, by six associations regarding the company's duty of social and environmental supervision. Friends of the Earth France, Survie and four Ugandan associations believe that the energy giant is not fulfilling its duty of vigilance regarding violations of the environment and human rights in Uganda and in Tanzania, where Total will invest $ 10 billion. The plaintiffs believe that the identification of the risks associated with TotalEnergies' activities, as well as the measures to address them, are insufficient.
Survie and Friends of the Earth have recently published a report on Eacop, Total's giant pipeline project in Uganda and Tanzania. The report is the result of an unprecedented field survey in Tanzania and gives a voice to the communities involved. From the shores of Lake Victoria to the Indian Ocean, in all the regions affected by this future pipeline, the affected populations express feelings of powerlessness and injustice in the face of the practices of oil promoters that violate their most fundamental rights.
The Eacop, a heated pipeline project, will cross Tanzania to transport the oil extracted in Uganda to the port of Tanga, before being exported. This mega-oil project, fundamentally incompatible with the urgency to limit global warming to 1.5 C, is an environmental aberration.
It will cross many protected ecosystems, wildlife corridors and the Lake Victoria basin (on which 40 million people depend), while Total has not published any oil spill risk management plans to date.
Worse still, the Tanzanian coast being very vulnerable to the risks of tsunamis and cyclones, the oil infrastructures that will be built and the oil tankers that will come on board risk causing oil spills in the heart of an exceptional biodiversity. Half of Tanzania's coral massif is sheltered in this protected marine park.
Furthermore, according to the associations, Total tries to minimize the impacts of the project by underestimating its contribution to climate change. Eacop means it is 379.4 million tons of Co2 that will be released into the atmosphere, up to 34 million tons per year, more than the combined emissions of Uganda and Tanzani. By counting only the emissions caused by the construction of the pipeline and its use (less than 2% of total emissions), Total deliberately ignores the catastrophic quantities of CO2 emissions related to maritime transport, refining, but also and above all, to use of oil.
Not only that: the project involves a massive hoarding of land along the route of the pipeline. The lands of over 86,000 people, of which nearly 62,000 in Tanzania, are affected. The affected populations testify to a total absence of consultation and a systematic lack of information.
They tell us that they have given their land to Total under duress, in exchange for an undervalued financial compensation that, for most of those affected in Tanzania, has not yet been paid. Result: the affected populations, who live mainly on their crops, can no longer cultivate their land freely and still wait (sometimes for 3 or even 4 years) for the payment of a meager economic remuneration. They say they suffer from a serious shortage of food and cannot even repair their homes, which are on the verge of collapse.
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