The east African crude oil pipeline: future ecocide?
This guest blog is part of a series intended as a dedicated space for the many global movements/campaigns around the globe confronting ecosystem destruction to share their stories, narratives and perspectives.
This blog post was written by Omar Elmawi, Coordinator at the Stop EACOP campaign and the deCOALonize campaign - with the support of Louise Romain, Stop Ecocide International. He writes about the planned construction of the EACOP, a pipeline crossing East Africa, and the environmental, human and climate impacts (both local and global) of this ecocidal project.
The world’s longest electrically heated oil pipeline
Uganda sits on some of the largest crude oil reserves in the African continent, with an estimated 1.7 billion barrels of recoverable oil, sitting below its border with the Democratic Republic of Congo. Extracting and transporting this oil would mean causing certain destruction of some of East Africa’s most ecologically unique habitats.
This is exactly what TotalEnergies is planning to do. The fossil fuel giant owns one of the two major oil fields on the shores of Lake Albert, and a majority stake in the pipeline which would need to be built to transport it for export into international markets: the East African Crude Oil Pipeline, or EACOP. The 1,443 km long heated pipeline is slated to transport oil from the Tilenga and Kingfisher fields on the shores of Lake Albert in Uganda, to the port of Tanga, in Tanzania. Alongside the French company, the oil fields in Uganda (consisting of more than 400 oil wells) would also be operated by China National Offshore Oil Corporation Ltd.
Environmental, human and climate impacts of EACOP
Once built, the EACOP will cause irreversible damage to the biodiversity, natural habitats and water, as well as displace local communities and threaten their livelihoods. It also carries significant global impacts by contributing to global warming.
The pipeline will disturb nearly 2,000 square kilometers of protected wildlife habitats, including the Murchison Falls National Park, the Taala Forest Reserve, the Bugoma Forest, and the Biharamulo Game Reserve. These reserves are critical to the preservation of vulnerable species such as the Eastern Chimpanzee and African Elephant, both listed on the “red list” of threatened species by the International Union for Conservation of Nature. It will also disrupt biologically significant marine areas, including mangrove forest reserves and coral reefs, along the Tanzanian shore, as well as numerous Ramsar wetlands sites of global importance.
EACOP will also affect human communities, posing significant risks to millions of people. About a third of the pipeline will run through one of Africa’s largest lake basins, Lake Victoria, which more than 40 million people rely on for water and food production. A small spill or leak, which is highly likely since the pipeline traverses a seismic zone that regularly experiences earthquakes, would be catastrophic. Oil spills can be propagated over large distances by rivers and streams as well as infiltrate aquifers and contaminate water resources for decades to centuries.
Its climate impacts would be enormous and disastrous for humanity’s carbon budget. The pipeline and its associated infrastructure are projected to cause the release of an estimated 33 million tonnes of carbon dioxide every year. This would put in jeopardy various international commitments, such as the Paris Climate Agreement, the Convention on Biodiversity (CBD) and the Ramsar Wetland Convention, and risks non-compliance with several global and regional agreements as well as net-zero-emission targets set by the countries involved. Besides its significant contribution to the global climate crisis, the EACOP project would also open a new frontier of high-risk development in neighboring areas.
Future ecocide?
The tragedy here is that all of these devastating consequences – both for the people of Uganda and Tanzania, and for the plant and animal species inhabiting the impacted areas – are predictable. The threats to the natural world and human communities are well understood. Nobody will be able to turn around after it is completed and be shocked by the irreversible destruction of the natural world that was necessary to start pumping the oil.
Premeditated destruction of nature, or ‘ecocide’, is at the core of an increasingly prominent body of international legal and political thought, which is seeking to criminalise mass damage to the natural living world at the international level. According to a panel of prominent international environmental, human rights and criminal lawyers, ecocide is defined as “unlawful or wanton acts committed with knowledge that there is a substantial likelihood of severe and either widespread or long-term damage to the environment being caused by those acts.”
TotalEnergies’ plan to cause premeditated, widespread and permanent damage to the environment in Uganda and Tanzania could fall under the criteria of ecocide. Building the East African Crude Oil Pipeline would be a crime against the natural world, and a disaster for the livelihoods of the people of Uganda and Tanzania.
Counterarguments and promises
Ecocidal projects are often justified by their purported economic benefits, and EACOP is no different.
TotalEnergies promises jobs and investment for the region, estimating that 11,000 new positions will be created. However, almost all of these are short-term construction jobs needed to build the pipeline, which will evaporate once it is completed. When the oil starts flowing, just 200-300 permanent jobs will remain.
Completing the pipeline would also threaten vastly more important sources of work. Over 600,000 people in Uganda are employed in the tourism sector, which depends on the preservation of the very habitats that the pipeline would destroy. Even if more permanent jobs were on offer, it remains profoundly unjust that the work being offered Ugandans and Tanzanians relies on the destruction of our natural spaces.
Growing resistance: #StopEACOP alliance
Local groups and communities have joined forces with over 260 African and international civil society organizations to form the #StopEACOP campaign. Through public mobilisation, legal actions, research, shareholder activism and media advocacy, they are exerting pressure to halt the project.
As TotalEnergies and China National Offshore Oil Corporation Ltd. are seeking a $2.5 billion loan to get the project off the ground, Stop EACOP has drafted a list of the top recent financiers (banks and insurers) that are likely to be approached to join the loan. Last week, five major banks (Deutsche Bank, Citi, JPMorgan Chase, Wells Fargo and Morgan Stanley), an insurer and a export credit agency confirmed they will not join the project loan to finance the EACOP. They join the growing list of banks (20) and insurers (8) that do not want to fund or be associated with the EACOP.
This extractive project is bound to trigger a large suite of environmental, social and human rights issues. TotalEnergies has the moral responsibility to cancel the project – and governments around the world must start prosecuting these environmental crimes for what they are: ecocide.
