Uganda and Tanzania have signed agreements with two oil companies to build a gigantic pipeline through the heart of the African continent.
On 11 April, the governments of Uganda and Tanzania signed a series of agreements with French oil company Total and the China National Offshore Oil Corporation (Cnooc) to build a gigantic heated pipeline that will carry crude oil from western Uganda to Tanga, on the Tanzanian coast of the Indian Ocean, before being shipped to international markets.
The deal, worth 3.5 billion dollars (2.9 billion euros), paves the way for construction to begin on the East African Crude Oil Project pipeline (Eacop), which several international environmental organisations and Ugandan civil society groups have been fighting for years, including through the #StopEACOP campaign.
The mammoth infrastructure could indeed have a devastating environmental and social impact. Starting from Murchison Falls National Park, the Eacop will pass through several nature reserves, posing serious risks to biodiversity and the survival of some rare animal species; it will cross 230 rivers and run alongside crucial water basins such as Lake Albert and Lake Victoria (the largest in Africa), with a high risk of pollution in the event of leaks; and its construction will require the displacement of at least 12,000 families from various communities, which could create ethnic tensions.
Not to mention the fact that, according to NGOs, launching this project means fuelling the destruction of the planet. All that fuel, once burned, will produce emissions comparable to those of Denmark, according to various estimates. Reports and complaints are not lacking, such as that of the NGO Les amis de la terre, which has focused its campaign against Total. The African Institute for Energy Governance (Afiego) has also raised several concerns and urged the suspension of the plan.
Despite the Eacop project management having assured that all communities affected by the project will be compensated before construction begins, and despite Total having assured that it has carried out in-depth feasibility studies to identify the least ecologically and socially impactful route, environmental activists are not giving up. No fewer than 38 Ugandan and Tanzanian civil society movements wrote a letter of protest to the governments just days after the signing, while a few weeks earlier more than 260 African and international organisations sent an open letter to 25 commercial banks urging them not to finance the pipeline's construction, in an attempt to cut off its funding. Some, including Barclays, Credit Suisse and South Africa's Standard Bank, have pulled back.
This period of global economic uncertainty would not seem to be the right moment to launch such a project, given that the pandemic has caused demand and prices for hydrocarbons to collapse. Yet the petrochemical industry is always in search of new fields to replace exhausted ones. And the two oil reserves discovered between Uganda and the DRC are currently among the largest and most economically viable to exploit.
Uganda's crude oil is highly viscous, which means it must be heated to 50°C to remain liquid enough to flow. At 1,445 kilometres long, with a 61-centimetre-diameter pipe that is mostly buried underground and a safety corridor at least 30 metres wide, with more than 80 control stations along the route, the Eacop would thus become the world's longest electrically heated crude oil pipeline, and its construction is now due to begin this year, as announced by the companies, which have already opened tender processes.
