What is EACOP?
East-African Crude Oil Pipeline. TotalEnergies is developing a giant oil project in Uganda and Tanzania.
The French company, associated with the Chinese oil company CNOOC, wants to exploit the oil located in the area of Lake Albert, in Uganda.
It then plans to transport the oil to the Indian ocean, at the port of Tanga, in Tanzania.
It is planned to build an oil pipeline of more than 1400 km. Due to the viscosity of oil, this pipe will be heated to approximately 50°C over its entire length, making it the longest heated pipeline in the world.
EACOP (East-African Crude Oil Pipeline) refers to this pipeline.
The problem
The EACOP pipeline will cross many protected natural areas, displacing approximately 118,000 people.
Numerous human rights violations have been reported during the expropriations of the inhabitants, who were often prohibited from using their land even before receiving financial compensation. These compensations are also insufficient.
Protected areas include the Murchinson Falls National Park, the Budongo Chimpanzee Reserve or the Wembere Steppe. Areas of high biodiversity, hitherto almost untouched.
According to the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN), the EACOP will “contravene at least two major international commitments, the Convention on Biodiversity and the Ramsar Convention on Wetlands.”
This project also goes against the recommendations of the IPCC, and of the International Energy Agency, who advocate no longer launching new fossil fuel projects.
It is therefore difficult to see how a project like the EACOP could be compatible with a livable planet in the coming decades.
Project details
More than 400 wells, and around 216,000 barrels of oil per day. Up to 34 million tons of CO2 per year.
The oil wells will be drilled in the North of the Lake, by TotalEnergies (Tilenga project), and in the South, by CNOOC (Kingfisher project). 132 wells will be located in Murchinson Falls National Park.
In this area, the project also includes an oil processing plant, and a water abstraction system from Lake Albert.
The oil extracted by the Tilenga and Kingfisher projects will be sent to the neighboring district of Hoima, from where a 1443 km pipeline will start. It will be exported from the port of Tanga, Tanzania.
For more information on the project, see the
StopEACOP coalition.
Our approach
We map the EACOP project using satellite data from the European Space Agency's Sentinel project.
These satellites fly over a given point approximately every 5 days, which allows regular monitoring of the work (provided the cloud cover is reduced).
We want to make visible, and more palpable, the risks and the considerable damage caused by this project. For most of us, the EACOP is thousands of miles from where we live, but its impact concerns us all.
We hope that the visibility of this damage will contribute to a strong collective action against this project, incompatible with a habitable planet.
