Environmental Impact Assessment as a tool for enforcing Environmental Law in the Oil and Gas Industry in Uganda

2.0 Overview of the oil and Gas industry in Uganda
Uganda is a land-locked country in East Africa bordered by Kenya to the east, Tanzania to the south, Rwanda to the south west, the DRC to the west and Sudan to the north.¹³ Ugandans energy sector like most sectors of the economy is largely informal and underdeveloped characterized by very low consumption of modern energy and over dependence on low grade forms of energy especially biomass-based fuels which account for than 92% of the total energy consumption.¹⁴
Therefore Uganda’s past decade has been characterized by revitalizing the economy and this has created a new additional need for other forms of energy which in the recent years has resulted into the development of the oil and gas industry.¹⁵
Oil exploration activities in Uganda are concentrated in the Albertine Graben, in the western region of the country. The Albertine Graben is the region on the Uganda–DRC border and includes Lake Albert and River Semliki, which lies in the northern section of the Albertine Rift.¹⁶

The oil exploration area stretches from the border with Sudan in the north in West Nile, to Lake Edward in the south-western tip of Uganda, covering an area of about 20,000 square kilometers and extends into the DRC. The oil reserves are spread over the following districts: Hoima, Masindi, Buliisa, Amuru, Rukungiri, Kanungu and Nwoya, Moyo and Adjuman, which lie in the northern section of the Albertine Rift.¹⁷

The process of oil exploration is not new in Uganda. It was first done by Wayland in the 1920s, who documented up to 52 oil and gas seeps in the Albertine Graben¹⁸.One deep well was drilled at Waki-B1 well in 1937 by the Anglo European Investment Company of South Africa, and some small stratigraphic wells were drilled in the areas of Kibiro and Kibuku, based on oil seep observations. However, no commercial discoveries were made during that time¹⁹.Several shallow wells were also drilled during the 1940s and 1950s for stratigraphic purposes²⁰.Owing to the outbreak of the Second World War, the colonial policy and political instability in the country in the 1970s, petroleum efforts stagnated between the years 1945 and 1980²¹.

Later the consistent and modern efforts witnessed a number of activities successfully undertaken and leading to the development of the sector. These include the following²²;
The 1983 acquisition of aeromagnetic data over the entire Albertine Graben results which confirmed three main depocentres conducive for petroleum generation, enactment of the Petroleum Exploration and Production Act which took place in 1985.Creation of a specialized petroleum unit in the Geological Survey and Mines Department. This unit was transformed into PEPD in 1991, 1992 saw licensing of PETROFINA for the entire Albertine Graben. PETROFINA left in 1993 without doing any work, in 1993, PEPD²³ commenced ground follow-up surveys in the areas identified by the aeromagnetic survey. Over 10,000 Km² of the Albertine Graben was geologically mapped and 7,500 line Kms of gravity and magnetic data was acquired by PEPD. This data was processed, interpreted and used for promotion of Uganda’s petroleum potential to investors. EA3 (Semliki basin) was licensed to Heritage Oil and Gas in 1997 which acquired the first 170 line Kms of 2D seismic data in the country in 1998. An additional 228 line Kms were acquired during 2001 in Semliki basin, south of Lake Albert. In 2001, EA2 (Northern Lake Albert Basin) was licensed to Hardman Petroleum Resources, The year 2002-2004 saw significant oil and gas shows after drilling the Turaco-1, -2 and -3 wells in Semliki Basin. In the same period, 1,589 line Kms of 2D seismic over Lake Albert and 390 Km2 of 3D seismic data in Semliki basin were acquired²⁴
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The quest oil, however, also raised very many environmental concerns regarding nature, scale and location as energy development projects are commonly associated with prevalent environmental impacts in most cases the conversion transportation and final utilization of many forms of energy are harmful to the environment for example at the global level energyA activities give rise to phenomena such as global warming, climate change and pollution of water air while at the local level energy is strongly linked to deforestation, destruction of eco system, micro-climate change and displacement of people and communities.²⁵
It is thus very important that the relationship between energy and the environment are controlled and systematically integrated into the country’s overall development process which has in Uganda been done through the Environmental Impact Assessment processes which have sought to enforce Environmental Law in the oil and gas industry among other safeguards which include²⁶;


• Ensuring the availability of the necessary institutional and regulatory framework to address environment and biodiversity issues relevant to oil and gas activities.
• Ensuring capacity building for the necessary manpower to monitor the impact of oil and gas activities on the environment and biodiversity.
• Requiring oil companies and their contractors/subcontractors to use self regulation and best practices in ensuring environmental protection and biodiversity conservation.
• Require oil companies and any other operators to return all operational sites to their original condition as an environmental obligation.
These have been incorporated in the environmental legal and institutional framework alongside the Environmenatl Impact Assessment so as to attain the enforceability of environmental in the oil and Gas industry as espoused below;