Africa Climate Summit: A Controversial New Project Seeks to Produce ‘Green’ Oil

The creation of a new oil pipeline in East Africa linking oil to be pumped out of the ground in Uganda to the coast in Tanzania is proving one of the most controversial developments seen in recent years.

Opponents argue that faced with a climate emergency no fresh drilling should be occurring that will add to the planet’s overheating, especially in a region where it means the displacement of local communities and the traversing of sensitive ecosystems.

As a result the East African Crude Oil Pipeline, or EACOP, has become a lightening rod for activists in Europe with its major backer France’s Total Energies targeted by campaigners.

In Africa, however, the situation has been more nuanced and as the continent gears up for the first Africa Climate Summit, which is being staged in Kenya next week, commentators have seized on it as an example of how that summit can unite development and sustainability.

The reason is the focus on using renewable energy to heat the pipeline, the first time such an approach has been undertaken on such a scale anywhere in the world.

Five solar farms are to be built to provide this electric heating. It had been planned this would be done via crude oil generators but, in an announcement ahead of the Kenya event, the pipeline’s CEO John Bosco Habomugisha announced that a solar option was instead to be adopted in recognition of the climate impact of the project in an attempt to create a “green pipeline”.

“Solar carries an expensive installation cost but during the life cycle of the project it will be cheaper,” he said. “The crude to power option that was initially proposed for the heating of the pipeline would have been expensive in the end since it would require constant purchase of crude.”

Peter Mulisa, the Chief Legal Officer for the Uganda National Oil Company which is a leading partner in the project, added: “Overall, we have a sector wide approach to reduce carbonization of the projects and improve their impact on our environment and climate. Even the nodding heads [the oil pumping technology]shall be replaced with submersible pumps that shall leave very little visual imprint on the environment.”

As well as solar, hydropower is also to be used along the Uganda section of the pipeline. With the solar power element, these are now calculated to drop the pipeline’s Greenhouse Gas inventory by as much as 60 per cent.Opponents of EACOP maintain such actions are window dressing at a time when the world must be losing its dependence on fossil fuels rather than unlocking new reserves of oil and gas.

The region is facing some of the most severe effects from the climate emergency, with some experts estimating 4,000 people were killed and around 20 million were affected by extreme events there last year alone.

But in Africa itself a number point to the upcoming summit and highlight how its theme is ‘Driving Green Growth and Climate Finance Solutions for Africa and the World’.

Faced with huge social and economic challenges, green objectives need to be combined with economic development, it is argued.The Uganda development may provide a test case for that.

The country presently stands just 132nd out of 221 nations in the Global Carbon Atlas with present annual emissions of 4.9 MtCO2. France is 21st with 277 MtCO2, the United Kingdom 17th with 330 MtCO2 and the United States 2nd with 4,713 MtCO2. Uganda further stands 171st for GDP per capita globally, according to the latest International Monetary Fund World Economic Outlook, with an average wage of $1,000 a year.

France is 24^th on the IMF index, the United Kingdom 22^nd and the United States 5th.Next week’s event in Nairobi will provide further evidence of how and if the continent is able to reconcile the development it so desperately needs with the sustainability objectives the West so desperately requires ahead of the COP28 climate change talks being held in Dubai in December.