Page 5 - AfrOil Week 50 2022

AfrOil COMMENTARY AfrOil

Additionally, it requires companies to develop by forcing a major oil company to give up a
and publish “vigilance plans” that identify the high-profile project, no matter how much it
risks that their projects may pose to human might benefit the countries involved, and would
rights or to the environment and describe con- never be satisfied with any version of the vigi-
crete measures that can be taken to prevent lance plan.
severe harm and mitigate such hazards in their
global operation. Separately, the companies in Case not settled yet
question must commit to implementing these It is, of course, too early to tell how this court
plans and disclose information on the metrics case will play out. Three years have passed since
of their implementation in annual reports. the environmental groups first filed suit against
The environmental groups have been argu- TotalEnergies, and a great deal has changed
ing that TotalEnergies violated the law because since then.
its 2019 vigilance plan was both inadequate and On the one hand, TotalEnergies has consoli-
inadequately implemented. TotalEnergies, on dated its holdings in the Tilenga fields. In Octo-
the other hand, has defended its plan – and has ber 2019, when the suit was first filed, it was still
also pointed out that it drew up another, more tangled up in negotiations with Tullow Oil (UK/
detailed plan in 2020. Additionally, it has argued Ireland), the company that first discovered oil TotalEnergies
that the plaintiffs are aiming at the wrong target, near Lake Albert, on a farm-out deal that was
since LADP is actually being carried out by its not settled until the spring of the following year. has argued that
Ugandan subsidiary, TotalEnergies Uganda. On the other hand, European energy mar- the plaintiffs are
kets and energy policy have shifted because of
Moving forward the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Because this aiming at the
In any event, the case is now moving forward development has disrupted oil and gas flows
in the French civil court system, and it is slated to Europe, many European officials are taking wrong target,
to reach its next milestone at the end of next a different approach to the environmental and since the project
February. climate issues driving groups such as Friends of
In the meantime, Friends of the Earth and the Earth and making decarbonisation a lower is actually being
the other plaintiffs are repeating their standing priority. (The UK, for example, has just approved
complaints against TotalEnergies, including the opening of a new deep coal mine for the first carried out by
their concerns about inadequate compensation time in three decades.)
to owners of property along the EACOP pipeline Of course, public policy won’t necessarily its Ugandan
route. They are also ramping up their statements decide the outcome of a court case. Neverthe- subsidiary
of concern about the risk that the upstream and less, other policy considerations may come into
midstream components of LADP pose to the play as hearings move forward. There may be
environment and to the global climate. debate, for instance, about whether and to what
For its part, TotalEnergies has signalled that it extent a law that compels French companies to
does not intend to give up. RFI quoted Antonin avoid land seizures applies to a foreign govern-
Lévy, a lawyer for the company, as saying earlier ment working with a French company. (With
this month that he could have “spent five hours respect to EACOP, the governments of Tanzania
denouncing the failings” and falsehoods of the and Uganda have been appropriating the land
plaintiffs but would prefer to focus on “the inad- needed to build the pipeline.)
missibility of their claim,” given that the project In the meantime, perhaps the question is
is not being executed in France. whether the lawsuit will have any impact on
He also alleged that the environmental preparations to bring Tilenga and the EACOP
groups were trying to set a public precedent link on stream in 2025. ™

The environmental groups filed suit against the French major in October 2019 (Photo: Friends of the Earth)

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