While key focus points of the Africa Energy Forum (AEF) in Nairobi include renewables and energy transition, a balance needs to be struck with oil and gas projects that can greatly benefit African nations. Balancing these projects must also take into account environmental protection, remediation and animal welfare. These are pertinent factors when projects like this are engaged, and they have all featured in our courts quite recently, says Michael Jenkins of Lopes Attorneys, a boutique practice that won Specialist Law Firm of the Year at the 2022 African Legal Awards.

“Companies and governments should always be looking to invest in renewable energies, but, as we know, Africa is still very much a developing continent,” said Jenkins, whose practice includes environmental law and animal welfare. “We think that at least for the foreseeable future, oil and gas are some of the only viable ways to provide a developing economy with the energy and the funding it needs in order to maintain those levels of development.”

Jenkins points to nations like Nigeria, one of the fastest growing economies in sub-Saharan Africa, where a lot of that growth is facilitated by oil and gas exports.

Lopes Attorneys was recently involved in a legislative research project with a prominent university, analysing African nations with different historical backgrounds and languages, including Mozambique, South Africa, Namibia, Angola, Tanzania, Côte d’Ivoire and Kenya. “We did extensive research into current legislative and regulatory frameworks for oil and gas exploration, extraction and production,” Jenkins explained.

Jenkins jokes he had to quickly go from being a lawyer to “a bit of a geologist overnight”, as they examined not only legal and regulatory frameworks and the ease of public interest litigation for various stakeholders, but also an overview of oil and gas reserves.

“We also investigated who the major players were within these jurisdictions,” he shared. “That includes private ventures operating there, key regulatory bodies and state-controlled oil companies that private ventures often have to partner with before they can have a project approved.”

Jenkins said key takeaways from the initial research include that many jurisdictions share similar frameworks when it comes to the oil and gas industry. Their research also showed that “local content” laws are geared towards rectifying past injustices that linger from colonial times, when resources were extracted locally and exploited in a way that didn’t benefit African nations.

Established during the pandemic with an ethos of “Sustainability Simplified”, Lopes Attorneys is a pioneering firm that represents a break from traditions, says Jenkins.

“Our firm is very young, it’s vibrant and very dynamic in the way it operates. While we have a high appreciation for the traditions of our profession, we wholeheartedly believe success is driven by innovation. We’ve always been very keen to not shy away from change and rather embrace it. Because that’s the way you develop, right? You’ve got to embrace change.”

Jenkins believes the same is true of the energy industry.

“Africa’s oil and gas reserves are still largely untapped. In South Africa there’s been lots of talk of the just energy transition, and the push for renewable energies is very important. I think the best approach is that for the foreseeable future, oil and gas and renewables have to work together, not against each other. It’s not a case of you can have one but not the other.”

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