RimbaWatch said a local energy company entered a production sharing contract for the Baram Junior cluster in January 2023. The project’s EIA was submitted to the environment department on Oct 16, with its approval currently pending.
It said while a record of the EIA’s submission to the environment department is found online, the only information available is its title and the date it was submitted.
It said neither an executive summary nor the full EIA report is available, which contradicts the department’s EIA guidelines.
“The omission of the Baram Junior cluster’s EIA represents a concerning case of EIA non-transparency for Malaysia,” said RimbaWatch director Adam Farhan in a statement.
“The project constitutes a high environmental risk due to the proximity of the field to a sensitive Marine Protected Area (MPA), the non-compatibility of fossil fuel expansion to global climate goals, and inadequate decarbonisation plans by the company.
“The public deserves access to the EIA to know the amount of additional planet-warming greenhouse gases (GHGs) it will emit, and how the proponent proposes to mitigate the impact of these GHGs, and potential impact to an MPA”.
RimbaWatch said that according to maps published by the project’s proponents, the location of the proposed project is near the Miri-Sibuti Coral Reef National Park, a marine protected area off the coast of Sarawak.
Because of this, its biodiversity could become vulnerable to acoustic impact from exploration activities, damage to the seabed, and discharge, including lubricants, from drilling.
This could damage water quality and cause sedimentation. The risk of leaks and spills are particularly significant as they can spread over tens of thousands of hectares, as evidenced by last year’s MT Princess Empress spill.
The Princess Empress, a marine tanker carrying 800,000 litres of industrial fuel, sank in rough seas off the Philippines in February 2023. Diesel fuel and thick oil from the vessel contaminated the waters and beaches of Oriental Mindoro province and surrounding islands, with people falling sick.
“These risks are not rare in Sarawak’s fossil fuel activities; in the past four years alone, a ship collided with an oil rig, and an offshore rig sank while being set up, within the state,” it said.
RimbaWatch also said it is unclear how the planned extraction of fossil fuels from the Baram Junior field is aligned to Malaysia’s emissions pathway to achieve net-zero by 2050.
It said the federal and state authorities, as well as the project’s proponents, should provide written evidence that the development of the Baram Junior field will be consistent with the net-zero target, in case the project is approved by the environment department.
It alleged that the project’s proponent does not have a credible decarbonisation strategy and the short-term decarbonisation actions targeted by the proponent to reduce their fossil fuel emissions include “rooftop solar, cloud data storage, LED lighting”, which have little relevance to the decarbonisation of lifecycle fossil fuel emissions.