Drilling and Flaring in the African Queen Papyrus Swamp
Oil -
1.7 billion barrels has been discovered under and around Lake Albert. One of
the Rift Valley African Great Lakes, it is shared by the Democratic Republic of
the Congo and Uganda.
Visit: http://www.fieldofreeds.comThe film masterpiece African Queen directed by John Huston and starring Humphrey Bogart, Katharine Hepburn was shot in 1951 on a number of locations including papyrus swamps at the mouth of the Victoria Nile in Uganda. Available for years in video it was rereleased as a DVD with much hullabaloo. Now from Africa where the film was made comes disturbing news of changes caused by a multibillion barrel oil discovery on Lake Albert.
Exploratory
drilling has already begun in earnest, a pipeline to Lake Albert from Mombasa
on the Kenya Coast is being built, a refinery is planned and the governments
concerned are standing by to rake in the profits.
It was
in the papyrus swamps in this part of Africa on the Victoria Nile just before
it enters Lake Albert where the famous scene was captured of Bogart shimmying
up the mast of the African Queen and yelling out: Nothing but grass and papyrus
as far as you can see!
Part of
the northern oil block region on the Ugandan side lies inside the Murchison
Falls National Park at the northern end of the Lake. It is here that the Nile
enters the Lake after traveling northwest from Lake Victoria. Once there it
exits the Lake a bit further north, after which it is called, the Albert Nile.
At the
place where the Nile enters Lake Albert is a delta and papyrus swamps that were
shown in the film. Just south of here is a point of land called Port Butiaba,
which was the Uganda location of the Kungdu Village and Mission Church in the
film.
You
remember the scene where Bogart first has dinner with Hepburn and Morley as his
stomach grinds away making horrendous noises. That small lake port and
surrounding village will be redeveloped by, Tullow Oil, a London-based oil
company exploring the Lake. They intend to use this port for the transportation
of heavy machines for offshore oil drilling in Lake Albert.
Sammy Tuja in Afronline, a news alert Internet agency distributed by Telpress (www.Afronline.org), also informs us that the companies involved are conducting exploratory drilling within Murchison Falls National Park, a crucial site of biodiversity, and that gas flaring will be allowed in both Blocks 1 and 2 along the northeastern end of the Lake in full view of the Park.
Terry
Macalister in the Guardian, Daniel Howden in the Independent and
also Pete Browne in the NY Times (Green Inc.) in February,
2010, all reported concerns that gas flaring on Lake Albert has the potential
to release huge volumes of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, as well as
impacting adversely on the Murchison Falls Park.
The Park
is one of the world’s most precious biodiversity resources, and the potential
is here to cause massive pollution in the water of the Nile and the Lake, as
well as in the papyrus swamps which abound on both the river and lake.
©
Copyright J. Gaudet, 2010, all rights reserved.
(Photos from Wikimedia
Commons.) 
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