By Enyichukwu Enemanna
Petroleum Agency on Tuesday, announced that Uganda has launched its first oil drilling programme, a key project it described as milestone, targeting to meet its benchmark of first oil output in 2025.
This is coming nearly two decades after the East African nation discovered commercial reserves of petroleum in one of the world’s most biodiverse regions, but production has been repeatedly delayed by a lack of infrastructure like a pipeline.
“The president [Yoweri Museveni] has officially commissioned the start of drilling campaign on the Kingfisher oilfield,” the Petroleum Authority of Uganda (PAU) said on Twitter.
The Kingfisher field, is part of a $10bn scheme to develop Uganda’s oil reserves under Lake Albert in the west of the country and build a vast pipeline to ship the crude to international markets via an Indian Ocean port in Tanzania.
“We are excited as a country and Africa,” the country’s energy Minister, Ruth Nankabirwa told the AFP news agency.
The Kingfisher field, operated by the state-owned China National Offshore Oil Corporation (CNOOC), is expected to produce 40,000 barrels of oil per day at its peak, PAU said.
PAU, which regulates the petroleum sector, said President Yoweri Museveni launched the programme at a site in the Kingfisher project area, one of the country’s two commercial oil development areas.
Uganda’s second project area, Tilenga, located north of Lake Albert astride River Nile, is operated by France’s TotalEnergies.
CNOOC and TotalEnergies co-own all of Uganda’s existing oilfields alongside the state-run Uganda National Oil Company (UNOC).
At peak, Uganda plans to produce about 230,000 barrels of crude oil per day. The country’s crude reserves are estimated at 6.5 billion barrels, of which 1.4 billion barrels are recoverable.
However, the plans to tap the oil at Lake Albert, a 160-kilometre (100-mile) long body of water separating Uganda from the Democratic Republic of Congo, have run into strong opposition from rights activists and environmental groups.
They have said it threatened the region’s fragile ecosystem and the livelihoods of tens of thousands of people.
