- For years, residents of the coastal village of Djeno in the Republic of Congo have complained of hydrocarbon pollution and the effects of gas flaring on their health.
- TotalEnergies EP Congo (TEPC), a subsidiary of the French oil giant, has had its contract to manage the Djeno terminal renewed, despite evidence of remaining pollution from half a century of operations.
- The environment ministry has prohibited toxic gas emissions, as well as the discharge of polluting substances, into marine and continental waters.
- In a statement, TEPC said it had taken steps to mitigate pollution in the area, adding that industrial activities by other companies had also contributed to the situation.
After hours spent at sea, fisherman Guy Bayonne Balou and his crew return to the southern shore of the Republic of Congo with their catch. The crew carry their pirogue, a small canoe, to the beach beside the Bouloumouka mangrove; inside the canoe are a handful of fish. Was it a good catch? “No,” Balou replies with a chuckle.
The residents of the fishing village of Djeno point to a range of factors that have decreased their yield, including climate change, but talk soon turns to pollution and the nearby oil terminal, operated by a subsidiary of French oil giant TotalEnergies.
“It’s encroaching on the fish’s natural breeding ground,” Balou says. “Where they could feed and reproduce, there’s this pollution. The fish can no longer live in that environment, they’re forced to go and live elsewhere.”
Since 1972, Djeno has been home to the country’s largest oil terminal, from where most of the oil extracted in the country is produced. TotalEnergies EP Congo (TEPC), previously known as Elf Congo, is the main owner and operator.
In 2020, the concession contract came to an end, and the terminal became the property of the Congolese state. Management rights were renegotiated, and TotalEnergies was awarded the lion’s share for the next 20 years for the modest rent of $1.5 million per month. TotalEnergies CEO Patrick Pouyanné told AFP at the time that the company would work “in good faith” with the authorities.
Yet according to the terminal’s 2016 Biodiversity Action Plan (BAP), shared with Mongabay and Mediapart by French accountability platform Climate Whistleblowers, since the 1990s more than 96,000 liters (25,360 gallons) of crude oil have leaked from the terminal into the nearby Loubi lagoon and along the coastal mangroves.
Crude oil is highly toxic to marine ecosystems. It can kill fish, birds and marine mammals, and damage sensitive ecosystems.
Biodiversity at risk
The Djeno terminal is located in the Cayo-Loufoualeba wetlands, a biodiverse region that was declared a Wetland of International Importance under the Ramsar Convention in 2007. It’s a haven for hippos (Hippopotamus amphibius), chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes) and 378 species of birds. Two species of sea turtle, the leatherback (Dermochelys coriacea) and olive ridley (Lepidochelys olivacea), both classified as vulnerable to extinction, lay their eggs on the beaches here.
According to the BAP, which has not previously been reported, the “accidental hydrocarbon pollution” from the terminal has had a “major” impact on coastal habitats and turtles, while there have been “very strong” impacts from “chronic hydrocarbon pollution of process water.”
To remedy the situation, the company planned to install a “hydrocarbon retention coil in the Loubi lagoon” and to improve its water treatment network.
The 2016 BAP also states that “clean-up operations were carried out in 2003 following the discharge of hydrocarbons into the lagoon”, but no clean-up action was planned in 2007. The last decontamination operation took place in 2011 and lasted three months. Actions to clean up the lagoon had to be halted in 2011 due to “tensions between young people from two Djeno neighborhoods.”
The BAP specifies that, at the time of its publication, “the significance of the current impact of accidental runoff pollution on the Loubi lagoon remains major.”
A published commitment by Pouyanné states that a BAP in a Ramsar zone “is designed to achieve a Net Gain in Biodiversity certified by a third-party institution.” As a signatory to the Act4Nature charter, TotalEnergies agreed to take measures to avoid, reduce and compensate for the environmental impacts of a project, with the aim of “no net loss of biodiversity, or even a net gain.”
Yet the BAP doesn’t contain a complete list of local plant and animal species in the area, admitting “there has not been a faunal inventory as such on the Djeno site”. Instead, the 2016 document focuses on the Loubi lagoon and its threatened and protected species. Many species are therefore overlooked in the plans.
In a statement to Mongabay, TEPC said the 2016 BAP was valid until 2021. It added that another BAP was created, covering the period 2023-2028, which took “account of the ecosystem services provided by the lagoon”, without providing a copy of the document for verification.
This limited focus is a common problem with such plans, Brian Padilla, an ecologist at the French National Museum of Natural History, told Mongabay.
“When consultancies try to carry out an initial inventory of biodiversity, they often base themselves almost exclusively on a very restricted list of species. The consultants will look first and foremost at those species that are going to be protected, because the project owner is thinking, ‘I’m going to have a regulatory consequence, so I have to do something.’ And in the end, the proportion of biodiversity that is actually assessed is not representative of how ecosystems function, it merely represents the legal risks that the project owner thinks his project will incur,” he said.
Questions over neutrality
The situation at Djeno outraged a former employee of Biotope, the consultancy that TotalEnergies contracted to produce the BAP. For security reasons he preferred to remain anonymous.
“Ethically speaking, working at Biotope made me realize that there were things that weren’t right. Talking about it around me, I quickly realized that it was quite common, almost normal, and I didn’t understand why it was normal. The world of consultancy is just as guilty of destroying biodiversity,” he said.
Biotope did not respond to a request for comment for this article.
When this former employee was working for the company, he said, he discovered connections between the firm’s design office and its contractor that he considered unethical.
“It was not a neutral commercial relationship. They passed on information internally. There’s a benefit in keeping things that way.” he said.
According to the pitch document for the BAP that Mongabay obtained from Climate Whistleblowers, Biotope quoted TotalEnergies 97,380 euros (about $100,000) including tax, a large sum for a company with declared working capital of 18,832 euros (about $19,300).
In the 2015 bid document, the Biotope consultant states that its report will conclude with “validation by Total,” suggesting that TotalEnergies would have the final review of the suggested measures, raising questions over the independence of the report.
Biotope was previously criticized by a group of naturalists in 2014 in connection with its involvement in a planned airport in France.
Padilla, the ecologist, said such consultancies are simply governed by the “law of the market.”
“There is an obvious form of subordination between a project owner and his consultancy firm,” he said. “There’s a call for tenders and the client puts the consultancies out to tender and they look at them and say, ‘Well, I’m going to spend so much money on my impact study, what can you do for me?’
“In the end, the client will go for the one that can sell him the most comprehensive study for the least amount of money, and this inevitably leads to a deterioration in the quality of the impact study, because whoever says they can get results with the least amount of data will be put forward, whereas they will often weaken their study.”
Legal battle
According to an Amnesty International report published in 2024, in 2016 the Association Jeunesse pour la Vie du Kouilou (AJVK), a local NGO, filed a legal complaint against TEPC.
“In 2019, the court ruled that the company was responsible for pollution and ordered it to pay damages and resume the clean-up of the Loubi lagoon,” the report states. According to Amnesty, locals in Djeno don’t consider the company’s cleanup operations sufficient.
Alain Pratt, a fisherman and member of AJVK, said that after winning the case, members of the local community understood TotalEnergies was ordered to completely clean up the area by 2025. But only two months later the company claimed to have completed remediation.
“It only lasted two months. Two months instead of five years. They removed just the most conspicuous parts, but since no one from the government comes here, nothing has been done since 2019, so we don’t talk about it anymore,” Pratt said.
Other fishers in the region who spoke to Mongabay were similarly unimpressed by TotalEnergies’ efforts.
Efferole Mabiala, a 58-year-old fisherman, has worked in the Loubi lagoon, which borders Djeno and is used as a waste runoff reservoir by TEPC, since he was a child. “We’re fed up with Total. We asked Total to completely clean up this lagoon, but to this day, there are still impacts,” he told Mongabay.
Mongabay asked TEPC about the request. In an email they said that the government had created a committee under the oil and gas ministry in 2018 that was charged with cleaning up the lagoon, though it could not share the details as the government had not made them public.
According to a statement from the committee, following testing of the water, “the lagoon is no longer polluted”.
In 2022, the authorities stated that TotalEnergies had carried out the cleanup according to “the rules of the game.”
Testing the waters
Mongabay visited Djeno in August to investigate the claims that TEPC had mitigated the effects of its pollution in the region.
The Loubi lagoon appears relatively clean at first glance, but the floor of the lagoon is carpeted in small black pellets.
Placide Kaya, environmental and social assessment expert for Eco Durable Sarlu, a company that makes environmental assessments, said that when the temperature rises, the pellets melt, adding more oil to the ecosystem.
“This disturbs the lagoon’s biodiversity. Oil pollution can have an impact on the pH [level] of the water. These oils have a very high hydrogen potential, so when they melt, they start to disrupt the physical state of the water,” Kaya said.
The pellets are also visible at the nearby Djeno beach. Under the supervision of a qualified scientist, Mongabay collected a soil sample and had it analyzed by an independent laboratory under Dutch pollutant standards (a set of environmental standards used internationally).
The analysis found that “residual levels of this pollution are still very low,” adding that as the Loubi lagoon is connected to the ocean, the pollution found could be connected to “a polluting slick from the ocean entering the Loubi during a high tide. It’s unlikely but not impossible. But it could also come from the terminal’s waste water.”
The main pollution indicators, such as volatile organic compounds (VOCs) and polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs), are either below detection limits or within acceptable standards, according to the scientist.
While the findings show that the area doesn’t meet the threshold of the Dutch pollutant standards that would require further cleanup operations, this doesn’t mean the pollution that was found has had a marginal impact on biodiversity.
Even low levels of hydrocarbon pollution may negatively affect sensitive species such as clams and oysters, while oil that drifts into the mangroves can affect their growth.
“So you have these oils that stick around the mangrove roots and clog them up. So it disrupts the growth of these trees, and the oysters clinging to the roots dry up and die,” said Kaya, the environmental and social assessment expert.
Mangrove forests in tropical and subtropical zones serve as a boundary between land and sea. The intertwined stilt roots of mangrove trees can grow on soil with high concentrations of salt. These and other coastal ecosystems like wetlands and seagrasses store more carbon than traditional forests, according to U.S. scientific and environmental agencies. Their roots serve as nurseries for various marine species, so their degradation also has an impact on the quantity of fish to be found in the open ocean.
“On the surface of the water you’ll see this oil there. The fish doesn’t grow and it doesn’t taste the same. It smells like crude oil,” said Mabiala, the fisherman, who added his children often complain of stomach aches and diarrhea after eating fish caught in the area.
Auditing the site
For years, Brice Mackosso, permanent secretary of the Justice and Peace Commission, an NGO based in the coastal city of Pointe-Noire, has been fighting to have the pollution around the Djeno terminal recognized and for TotalEnergies to further clean the region.
“We can’t prove that the pollution comes from Total. We often hear the scientific argument. We need proof and we don’t have any … It’s impossible to exploit oil without polluting. But we need to carry out water and soil analyses to see,” he said.
There are numerous other industrial sites in the region including a gas power station, the production of rebars, fishing equipment warehousing, logging, and the processing and marketing of lumber and its derivatives, which could also have an impact on the pollution levels.
In October 2021, the Republic of Congo’s General Directorate for the Environment validated a certificate of conformity for “an environmental and health audit report carried out by an independent firm.” But if such an audit was carried out, the findings aren’t publicly available.
Abdoulaye Diarra, a researcher with Amnesty International who authored the human rights NGO’s Djeno report last year, said the regional environment agency had told him further water quality tests had found “no problem.”
“The government always presents itself as being one step ahead on environmental issues, but at the same time, they benefit greatly from underdocumenting any violations that may occur, whether at the terminal or elsewhere,” he said. “Everything is glossed over.
“Environmental impact studies are nowhere to be found,” he added. “We asked to consult them. We’ve been told, ‘No, that’s not possible,’ for reasons that we don’t think are convincing. This goes against the right to information, not only for the population but also for all those who work on environmental issues.”
Flaring
Another threat to biodiversity mentioned in Djeno’s BAP is flaring, the process of burning off unwanted gas during oil extraction. According to the World Bank, the Republic of Congo released an estimated 1.67 billion cubic meters (59 billion cubic feet) of gas in 2023, a steady increase since 1996.
To assess the level of flaring in the area, Mongabay partnered with a consortium of journalists from Mediapart and Domani to review satellite data supplied by the Group on Earth Observation of the Payne Institute for Public Policy and the environmental NGO SkyTruth.
We were able to estimate that from 2012 to 2022, emissions from Djeno’s flares have risen from around 100,000 metric tons of CO2 in 2012 to 220,000 metric tons in 2022, roughly equivalent to 110,000 cars being driven in France for a year.
However, not everything can be attributed to the Djeno terminal. On our visit to the site, we observed four flares, two at the oil terminal itself and two at the Djeno gas power plant. According to local residents, the flares have burned continuously for more than 20 years.
Flaring releases numerous polluting components into the atmosphere. Among them, one can find fine particulates, hydrogen sulfide, nitrogen dioxide and black carbon, which, at high levels or with continuous exposure, have been linked to serious health impacts.
On the approach into Pointe-Noire, the rotten-eggs smell of the flaring becomes overpowering, leaving a strong taste in the mouth and causing dizziness.
“In the course of a day, you can smell a wave coming three, four times,” said Pratt, the fisherman. “Even grandchildren aged 7 or 8 are already familiar with the smell, and even a child aged 2 or 3 will say, ‘That doesn’t smell good, it stinks.’ Then it goes away for a while, then it comes back.”
An audit of environmental illnesses carried out on the coast of Pointe-Noire in 2006 showed that Djeno has high rates of cancer, dermatoses and lung diseases, which may be caused by air and water pollution.
Jean-Louis Pecho, a former TotalEnergies employee, experienced those symptoms. “I worked as a cleaner at the terminal from August 1, 1990, to 1998. I had protective equipment, but when I took it off, the smells persisted. Today, I have a lung problem,” he said. “We’re tired, we want doctors to come and tell us what’s wrong. And Total doesn’t take medical expenses into account.”
Pratt said these illnesses are still widespread, but due to a lack of medical services, they aren’t taken seriously.
“We have no medical followup. So we’re sick people who don’t know we’re sick. You’re going to suffer from headaches, you’re going to go to a dispensary where they’re going to do a test, and that’s where they’ll find you with spots on your lungs. H2S is toxic to the body,” he said.
On Tuesday, Oct. 8, 2024, just a few weeks after we met, Alain Pratt passed away. He died of a heart attack, according to those close to him.
Flaring is also a major source of the greenhouse gases CO2 and methane, which contribute to global warming. It also has an impact on biodiversity. Other toxic substances found in the gas produced by flaring, such as nitrogen oxide, react with water in the atmosphere to form acid rain, which, according to the U.S.Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), can remove “minerals and nutrients from the soil that trees need to grow.”
Since 2004, TotalEnergies has been a member of the World Bank’s Global Gas Flaring Reduction program, which brings together governments and private companies with the aim of limiting flaring and its environmental impacts. TEPC states on its website, “Several initiatives are planned and key projects have already been launched to reduce flaring, notably at our offshore facilities and at the Djeno oil terminal. The aim is to eliminate routine flaring by 2025.” The company does not specify how this goal will be achieved.
TEPC said in a statement that the company “has pledged to cease routine flaring completely by 2030,” though it did not elaborate on the details of these plans. It added: “Concretely, across the whole Company, methane emissions from our operated facilities fell by 15% in 2024, year on year, thanks largely to the continued reduction of flaring and fugitive emissions in Exploration & Production facilities, and by 55% compared to our 2020 baseline, allowing us to achieve our target one year faster than planned.”
However, the effects of flaring are scarcely mentioned in the 2016 BAP, other than as visual pollution for turtles.
The Ministry of the Environment and the Ministry of Hydrocarbons did not respond to Mongabay’s requests for comment.
In January 2024, the environment minister issued a memo prohibiting the emission of pollutants of any kind, including smoke, dust and toxic gases, in any “industrial establishment.”
Another circular issued the same month bans the discharge of polluting substances into marine and continental waters that are likely to harm human health and marine life. Yet at Djeno, the flares are still burning.
Banner image: Total Energies Plant in Djeno. Behind one can see the smoke rising from the flares. Image by Elodie Toto for Mongabay.
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