Scientists warn of oil drilling at Lake Tanganyika

Dar es Salaam. As preparations for the exploration of oil and gas in Lake Tanganyika get into top gear, international scientists at the site are warning that if the activities are not pursued carefully, they could cause massive and long-term environmental disaster.

The two countries with the biggest stake of the lake, Tanzania and the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) last October for joint oil and gas exploration in and along the lake.

Recently, the Minister for Energy and Minerals, Prof Sospeter Muhongo, said that all four countries sharing the lake, including Burundi and Zambia, were to meet in DRC’s western port city of Kalemie this month for the first conference on the prospects of joint exploration activities in the second deepest lake in the world.

Concerned on the developments, Dr Erik Verheyen from the Royal Belgian Institute of Natural Sciences on behalf of the Cichlid Science 2015 Meeting and concerned scientists last November published an article entitled Oil Extraction Imperils Africa’s Great Lakes in the international scientific journal Science warning that although the region sees exploitation of hydrocarbon reserves as a vital economic opportunity, such business posed grave risks to the environment and local communities.

In the paper the scientists argued that thousands of oil spills reported in Nigeria demonstrate that the extraction and transport of oil were prone to accidents.

This is especially bad news for the African Great Lakes countries because they are virtually closed ecosystems.

“For example, for Lake Tanganyika, which contains about one-fifth of the world’s surface freshwater the flushing time is 7,000 years. This time frame implies that the recovery from an oil spill could take a millennia.

To make matters worse, the lakes’ location in a remote part of the world would impede a quick and effective reaction to an oil spill. Appropriate infrastructures are currently unavailable at the lake, and bringing in heavy equipment at the time of a spill would be cumbersome, logistically impossible, or prohibitively expensive,” reads the article in part.

An oil spill would markedly affect the health, water supply, and food security of local communities.

More than 10 million people depend on Lake Tanganyika alone for fisheries and water resources, and many more along the Congo River, into which the lake drains, are highly dependent on the lakes’ ecosystem.