Old video report misleadingly used to claim Ethiopian oil supplied to market
- Published on July 10, 2025 at 16:43
- 3 min read
- By Tolera FIKRU GEMTA, AFP Ethiopia
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Ethiopian Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed recently announced that his country will supply domestically produced natural gas to the market from next September. A post shared on Facebook after this announcement claims that Ethiopian crude oil is currently being sold, with a video as evidence. However, this is misleading: the video includes a clip from a news report about oil testing from more than seven years ago and an unrelated clip about a sewage leak in the United States. The country has not made crude oil available to the market yet.
The post in Amharic, published on Facebook on June 27, 2025, reads: “Ethiopian oil has become available to the market”.
“Ethiopian oil production has been increased and made available to the market,” adds the post, which has been shared more than 240 times since.
The post contains a six-second clip divided into two sections: the top half of the screen shows a news anchor speaking in Amharic while the bottom half shows thick black liquid bubbling out of the ground.
On July 3, 2025, Ethiopian Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed announced that in September, Ethiopia will begin supplying domestically produced natural gas to the market for the first time in the country’s history (archived here).
However, the video does not show that Ethiopian oil has already been supplied to the market.
Unrelated clips
There have been no official announcements about Ethiopian oil being made available to the market.
Prime Minister Abiy’s recent announcement said that his country would supply natural gas to the market in September.
AFP Fact Check used the video verification tool InVID-WeVerify to conduct reverse image searches on keyframes from the video.
The search results for the footage of the news anchor established that it was originally published on the official channel of the Ethiopian Broadcasting Corporation back in June 2018 (archived here).
The original video is over 29 minutes long and features an anchor presenting various news items, including a segment on Ethiopian crude oil production.
Between the 50- and 56-second mark, the anchor says in Amharic: “Ethiopian Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed announced that Ethiopia will begin testing oil production starting tomorrow.”
The misleading clip was extracted from this portion of the broadcast.
In July 2018, Ethiopia tested the production of crude oil in partnership with Chinese company Poly-GCL Petroleum Investments Limited from two reserves in the Ogaden Basin — the Kalub and Hilala fields in the eastern part of the country (archived here).
Search results for the second clip revealed that it shows a sewage leak in the US, not oil in Ethiopia (archived here).
AFP Fact Check previously debunked the clip in January 2024.
Experts confirmed that visual clues indicated the liquid in the video was not oil.
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