TotalEnergies and Station F, the largest start-up incubator in the world, jointly inaugurated on May 30 TotalEnergies On, a support program for start-ups in the field of renewable energies. The objective, according to Patrick Pouyanné, CEO of Total, is to make “faster and more efficient energy transition”.
A priori, this seems good news for ecology: investing in projects that accelerate the deployment of renewable energies is a salutary act in the fight against global warming. However, TotalEnergies has in its hands a much more powerful and immediate lever to limit our greenhouse gas emissions: abandon the Eacop project (East African Crude Oil Pipeline, in French, oil pipeline from East Africa) .
The company is about to build, in the heart of Africa, the longest heated oil pipeline in the world. Displacement of hundreds of thousands of people, endangered species in the area planned for operation, risk of contamination of a watershed on which forty million people depend: the local consequences of this pipeline will be dramatic.
Gigantic investments required
And that’s not counting the “climate bomb” represented by the oil that will be extracted: 35 million tonnes of CO2 per year will be issued… ie the equivalent of the emissions of 3.5 million French people. An aberration with regard to the recommendations of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) or the UN, whose Secretary General, Antonio Guterres, has just declared: “Investing in new fossil fuel infrastructure is moral and economic folly. »
One would think that if TotalEnergies abandons this project, other oil companies will exploit this gigantic pipeline in its place. However, without the French oil company, it is a safe bet that the project would stop definitively: the investments necessary to build the largest heated pipeline in the world are so gigantic that TotalEnergies had to join forces with the China National Offshore Oil Corporation. .
Twenty banks and eight insurers have also said they refused to support the project. Finally, the G7 has announced that it will put an end to all international financing of projects linked to fossil fuels as of this year. In other words, if TotalEnergies withdraws, this pipeline project will probably not see the light of day.
In view of this information, TotalEnergies’ investment in an incubation program around renewable energies seems very cynical: this Eacop project is so destructive that no technological solution, however inventive and beneficial, will be able to compensate the climatic, ecological and human disaster that it will generate.
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