A leading conservationist group on Friday lamented the dire environmental toll TotalEnergies’ controversial East African oil project is already taking even before the start of production.
The $10-billion project involves drilling more than 400 oil wells in western Uganda, many of them in Murchison Falls Nature Park, a biodiversity reserve and the country’s largest national park.
The project as environmentalists highlighted, is already severely impacting wildlife and the fragile ecosystem in the park, just a year after drilling began and before production gets underway next year. Even though TotalEnergies, which is working with Chinese oil company CNOOC, insists it is “a responsible operator” acting “transparently on social and environmental issues” surrounding the project.
A report from the Africa Institute for Energy Governance (AFIEGO) detailed obvious biodiversity loss, and found drilling vibrations were chasing elephants from the park. “It has been devastating,” AFIEGO conservationist Diana Nabiruma told AFP in a recent interview in Geneva.
The Tilenga drilling project in Uganda and a 1,443-kilometre (897-mile) East African Crude Oil Pipeline (EACOP) to transport its output to the Tanzanian coast, are projects that have faced opposition from environmentalists and rights activists. But the French giant is still pushing ahead with them.
AFIEGO — a 2022 winner of the Swedish Right Livelihood Award, which is often characterised as an alternative Nobel Prize — was among NGOs and individual Ugandans who last year sued TotalEnergies in Paris for reparations over alleged rights abuses linked to the project.
Maintaining that over 120,000 people had been displaced by the projects in Uganda and Tanzania, Nabiruma said she was “hoping for justice” in that case, lamenting that many had been “unable to replace all or parts of their land”.
However, TotalEnergies in an email, said “Tilenga and EACOP certainly don’t involve moving hundreds of thousands of people”.
