By Dhiladhila Magazine · Issue 05
Namibia's richest food system is the Benguela Current the oil sits in. A phased, smaller Venus changes how hard that water is pushed.
Namibia’s richest food system is not on land but in the cold, productive water of the Benguela Current, where the country’s fishing industry works the same Atlantic that now holds its oil. When the operator opted in February 2025 for a smaller, phased Venus development, it quietly changed the size of the footprint that oil will press onto those fishing grounds. The signal that the project may be smaller than first hoped reads differently to a trawler skipper than to a treasury.
The Orange Basin fields sit in the same marine ecosystem that supports Namibia’s hake fishery and its coastal communities. A phased, smaller development is not automatically gentler on that system, but it does change the scale and pace of the activity the ocean has to absorb.
One ocean, two industries
The Benguela Current supports both the fish Namibia catches and the tourism its coast sells, and it is already under strain from climate shifts and heavy fishing. Layering an oil province onto the same water raises an unavoidable question of shared space: seismic surveys, drilling and vessel traffic occupy the same ocean that the hake fleet and small-scale fishers depend on for a living.
A smaller, phased Venus reduces the intensity of that overlap at any one moment. Fewer simultaneous wells and a staged programme mean the industrial activity is spread thinner across time, which at least gives the ecosystem and the fishery smaller shocks to absorb.
Oil and fish share one current; the only question is how hard it is pushed at once.
The noise problem beneath the surface
The sharpest conflict is sound. Seismic surveys fire airguns that can reach around 260 decibels, pulsing every few seconds for months at a time, and fishers report that such noise drives fish out of their grounds and can disrupt the feeding and breeding of marine life. Humpback whales migrate through Namibian waters between roughly June and November, overlapping directly with exploration schedules.
A phased development does not silence the airguns, but a smaller programme means less survey and drilling activity competing with the fishing calendar. Sequencing that work around the migration and spawning seasons becomes more feasible when there is less of it to sequence.
Underwater noise is the part of an oil field that fishers feel first.
What a spill would cost the food system
The tail risk is a spill, and the coast has had a recent reminder. In 2024 the wreck of the MV Ultra Galaxy coated some 40 kilometres of Namibian shoreline with heavy oil, a small event beside a deepwater blowout but a clear illustration of what oil does to a working coast. A fishery and the communities that process its catch cannot easily price that risk, but they carry it.
A smaller Phase 1 does not remove the hazard, and 3,000 metres of water makes any deepwater incident hard to control. But fewer wells and a staged build mean fewer simultaneous points of failure, which is the honest limit of what resizing can offer the food system.
The fishery gains no insurance from a smaller field, only marginally fewer risks to run.
Managing the trade-off, not wishing it away
Namibia does not have the option of choosing only one industry. Fishing employs thousands and feeds both the domestic market and the export accounts, while oil promises revenue the country badly wants. The sustainable path is to run both under strict environmental clearance, with seismic and drilling schedules built around the biology of the current rather than the convenience of the operators.
A phased Venus makes that management easier, because a slower programme is simpler to monitor, to regulate and to halt if the evidence turns. The stewardship task is to hold the line between this decade’s oil and the fishery that must outlast it.
A slower oil build is a fishery’s best chance to be protected rather than displaced.
For anyone in fisheries, coastal food processing or marine conservation, the 2025 resizing is a reason to press for tighter terms while the activity is still small. The decision it invites is whether to use the phased build to lock in survey windows, spill readiness and monitoring that protect the Benguela food system now, before a later phase arrives at a scale that is far harder to police.
Sources: Reuters; The deep threats of drilling in the Orange Basin (The Namibian); Marine life facing the wave of Namibia’s oil boom (Conservation Namibia)
