While the world watches the Strait of Hormuz, a different energy corridor has been climbing toward completion with very little global coverage. The East African Crude Oil Pipeline (EACOP) — a roughly 900-mile pipeline carrying Ugandan crude to Tanzania — is nearing completion. A senior Tanzanian official states that the first oil will reach a Ugandan pumping station by December, arrive at the coast by February, and be loaded onto tankers in March. This project, one of East Africa’s largest infrastructure endeavors, is happening as the world’s two primary oil choke points — Hormuz and the Suez Canal — face significant disruption.
The Strait of Hormuz, through which about a fifth of global oil shipments typically pass, has been effectively blockaded since the U.S.-Iran conflict began this year. Thousands of miles away, the Suez Canal and its Red Sea approaches have not fully recovered from Houthi attacks that started in late 2023. Even after a partial ceasefire, Suez transit volumes remain approximately 60 percent below pre-crisis levels, and the canal’s annual revenue has plummeted from $10.25 billion to less than $4 billion.
Compounding these challenges are regional conflicts: Sudan’s civil war, now in its third year, and renewed fighting in Ethiopia following the collapse of the 2022 Tigray peace deal in September. East Africa is thus absorbing the shock of two failing global oil arteries at once. The EACOP, which gives landlocked Uganda a direct route to the ocean bypassing both contested straits, has taken on significant strategic importance.
However, unresolved human and environmental costs have made EACOP one of Africa’s most contentious infrastructure projects. Human Rights Watch documented in 2023 that construction activities “devastated” tens of thousands of people along the pipeline route, including forced displacement, forced labor, food insecurity, and household debt. Farmers reported being pressured to sign compensation agreements written in English — a language many could not read. The StopEACOP coalition estimates over 100,000 farmers have been displaced, while more than 30 banks and insurers have publicly refused to finance the project.
A Ugandan court in Hoima dismissed compensation claims from 42 affected families. Nevertheless, Ugandan farmers have pursued legal actions against TotalEnergies and EACOP Ltd. (incorporated in the U.K.) in Paris and London, and the European Parliament passed a resolution in 2022 condemning the project’s human-rights and environmental record.
TotalEnergies holds 62 percent of the project, with Uganda’s and Tanzania’s national oil companies each holding 15 percent and China National Offshore Oil Corporation owning the remaining eight percent. This ownership structure is particularly significant given rising geopolitical tensions in Gulf shipping lanes and the Red Sea. A French-led, Chinese-invested pipeline is poised to open a new export corridor for East African crude.
The situation highlights how nations are increasingly vying for control of oil resources as global choke points become unstable. As noted in Constructing World Culture by John Boli and George M. Thomas: “The increasing uniformity of societal interests within shared world-cultural goals and prescriptions implies that societies everywhere have increasingly similar goals and rely on increasingly similar resources. Uniformity at this basic level thus means that societies are much more likely to compete and struggle with one another than when they have different goals and rely on different resources.”
