Court bid to block TotalEnergies gas project off West Coast

Fishers in Port Nolloth are opposing TotalEnergies’ bid to explore for gas and oil off the West Coast. Photo: Ashraf Hendricks/GroundUp

• West Coast fishers and environmental activists have gone to court to try to stop French multinational, TotalEnergies, from exploring for oil and gas off the coast.
  
• The Aukotowa small-scale fisheries cooperative, and environmental justice organisations The Green Connection and Natural Justice, applied to the Western Cape High Court last month.
  
• They say natural gas should not be part of South Africa’s just transition and commitment to net-zero emissions by 2050.

A West Coast small-scale fishing cooperative and environmental justice organisations have launched a court bid to stop French giant TotalEnergies from exploring for oil and gas off the West Coast.

TotalEnergies announced in July this year that it would withdraw from two other offshore exploration projects, one off the south coast and another located between Cape Town and Cape Agulhas.

But the company intends to go ahead with exploration in the Deep-Water Orange Basin between Port Nolloth and Hondeklipbay, between 188 km and 340 km from the coast. It will include up to ten exploration well drills.

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The Aukotowa small-scale fisheries cooperative, and environmental justice organisations The Green Connection and Natural Justice, launched an application in the Western Cape High Court on 31 October. They are opposing the environmental authorisation for the project by the Department of Mineral Resources (DMR) and the Department of Forestry, Fisheries, and the Environment (DFFE).

In their founding papers, they argue that natural gas is carbon-intensive and should not be part of South Africa’s just transition and commitment to net-zero emissions by 2050.

They say the government has failed to assess the ecological impacts the exploration and production of offshore oil and gas will have, and that the oil spill risk assessment is flawed. While the risk of an oil spill is reported as “unlikely”, the impact of the oil spill is reported as “high” and “very high”. They argue that an oil spill is a “highly significant potential impact” that would be felt “most acutely” by the West Coast fishers like Aukotowa “as well as across the country and for years after the event”.

They also argue that the impact assessments failed to consider the socio-economic impacts on the Aukotowa fishers, who have no other form of employment, and whose livelihoods will be destroyed by an event like an oil spill.

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In his founding affidavit, the chairperson of the Aukotowa cooperative Walter Steenkamp said the fishers in Port Nolloth depend entirely on the ocean for their livelihoods.

“In recent years we have seen a decline in our fish stocks and changes in their migration patterns. We need to go further out to sea in our small row boats which is a safety risk for us. We believe that these changes are due to climate change,” said Steenkamp in his affidavit.

“Aukotowa is extremely concerned about the degradation of the oceans and our local coastline, which is at the heart of so much of our history and culture and is also now the source of our livelihoods,” he said.

In its environmental impact assessment, TotalEnergies said that natural gas is a “transition fuel” and “is included in the energy mix of the country to serve as a transition or bridge on the path to carbon-neutrality from 2050 onwards (in terms of the Paris Agreement) and provide the flexibility required to complement renewable energy sources”.

But the environmental groups say the project “flies in the face of South Africa’s climate commitments”. In a media statement on the court case they cite the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC)’s warning against the further development of fossil fuels.

GroundUp sent questions to the DMR, the DFFE, and TotalEnergies. None of them had responded by the time of publication.

This article was originally published on GroundUp.

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