FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
October. 23, 2025.
The StopEACOP coalition issues this statement to formally notify financiers, including investors and bondholders, linked to TotalEnergies and China National Offshore Corporation (CNOOC) of recent material developments in the East African Crude Oil Pipeline (EACOP) financing structure that significantly increase your financial, legal, and reputational exposure to the project.
This statement is issued simultaneously with the Finance Risk Briefing Update No. 6, which comprehensively outlines the project’s key updates, including ongoing and new risks and impacts.
In July 2025, EACOP Ltd. quietly disclosed that TotalEnergies and CNOOC have agreed to increase their financial commitments to the project in the form of shareholder loans 1. The disclosure suggests that TotalEnergies and CNOOC have committed to providing loans to their own project, in the face of large-scale rejection by the global banking sector. This would be a shocking example of shareholders in a joint-venture partnership providing both significant equity and debt financing, constituting roughly 86% of the total project cost – more than triple the amount that they initially planned to pay for 2.
The implication is clear: EACOP has faced unprecedented challenges to attract external financiers, many of whom have declined participation due to the project’s high human rights and environmental impacts and its misalignment with global climate objectives. Now, to keep the project alive, TotalEnergies and CNOOC are turning inward—relying on their own balance sheets and, by extension, your capital. This increases your financial risk, deepens your exposure to the project’s growing controversy, and links your investment portfolios even more directly to the environmental destruction, human rights abuses, and climate chaos that EACOP represents.
In making such a commitment, TotalEnergies and CNOOC are not only assuming greater risk themselves but are also exposing their shareholders and bondholders to a higher level of financial instability and reputational harm. As both TotalEnergies and CNOOC significantly fund their working capital through bonds, any new bond issuances by the companies could be providing critical sources of financing for EACOP.
This development also has direct implications for your responsibilities under widely recognized international standards, including the UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights (UNGPs) and the OECD Guidelines for Multinational Enterprises (OECD Guidelines), both of which set clear expectations for investor due diligence in identifying, preventing, and mitigating adverse impacts linked to business relationships. As financial backers of TotalEnergies and CNOOC, your continued association with EACOP—particularly in light of this increased capital exposure—constitutes a failure to meet your own obligations under these international standards.
We are therefore calling upon the shareholders and bondholders of TotalEnergies and CNOOC to act with integrity and foresight, in line with their responsibilities under the UNGPs and the OECD Guidelines, to avoid contributing to severe human rights and environmental impacts associated with the operations of your portfolio companies.
We strongly urge you to:
- Immediately commit to exclude new investments for TotalEnergies and CNOOC, until concerns have been addressed. In particular:
a. Investors should commit publicly to not purchasing any new securities, including shares or bonds, of TotalEnergies and CNOOC. Any additional bond issuances by the companies could be critical sources of financing for EACOP, Tilenga and Kingfisher.
b. Banks should not underwrite new bonds or grant any new general-purpose loans to TotalEnergies or CNOOC that could help finance EACOP or other fossil fuel expansion projects.
- Urgently engage TotalEnergies and CNOOC over the environmental and human rights risks and impacts associated with the EACOP, Tilenga and Kingfisher projects.
a. Engagement with the companies should refer to outstanding recommendations issued by international experts and civil society organizations, including, but not limited to:
i. International Federation for Human Rights (FIDH), Civic Response on Environment and Development (CRED) and Avocats Sans Frontières (ASF)’s recent community-based impact assessment of Tilenga, Kingfisher and EACOP.
ii. Human Rights Watch’s 2023 investigation into the impacts of the land acquisition process.
iii. Climate Rights International and Environment Governance Institute (EGI-Uganda), reports in 2024 and 2025 on the severe human rights violations occurring at the Kingfisher oil field. Also see the briefing paper: Extortion, Coercion, and Impoverishment.
b. The OECD Guidelines call upon institutional investors to “know and show” that they are acting responsibly. In other words, investors must not only identify and assess human rights risks (know); they must also communicate with relevant stakeholders about how these impacts are addressed (show). In line with this expectation, TotalEnergies’ and CNOOC’s investors should engage transparently with relevant CSO stakeholders, including those within the StopEACOP Coalition, on the progress made in their engagement with the companies to address identified risks and impacts.
c. The OECD Guidelines also encourage investors to seek ways to increase the leverage they hold over portfolio companies, including through collective action. TotalEnergies’ and CNOOC’s investors should therefore seek collaborative ways to exercise collective leverage over the companies.
- Establish a short-term, time-bound escalation strategy for your engagement with TotalEnergies and CNOOC, with the credible threat of ending all new investments in the two companies.
a. Investors should publicly call on Total and CNOOC to address concerns, indicating a short-term deadline and sanctions in case of lack of action.
b. Sanctions should include ending all new investment in Total and CNOOC, as well as voting against strategic resolutions – such as board members’ reelections – during their AGMs.
c. In accordance with your responsibilities under the UNGPs and OECD Guidelines, investors should consider divestment after further attempts at exercising leverage – including efforts to increase leverage through collective action – have failed.
d. Decisions to enact sanctions or divestment should be made public.
Footnotes:
Footnote 1: According to the EACOP Ltd. Annual Report 2024, “additional Facilities” have been signed “with parent companies [in the shareholders’ group] to fund the remaining portion of the Construction Budget.” See. [Back up]
Footnote 2: The original project estimates were $3.5 billion (40% equity and 60% debt), indicating that developers planned to provide about $1.4 billion (40% of $3.5 billion). By July 2025, the cost had risen to $5.6 billion (52% equity and 48% debt). The developers contributed $2.8 billion in equity and secured $755 million in external debt, leaving a financing gap of about $2 billion, which Total and CNOOC appear to have agreed to fill, bringing the developers’ total contribution to roughly $4.8 billion. This represents approximately 86% of the total $5.6 billion project cost. [Back up]
