Daily Monitor
Sunday April 25 2021
Summary
EACOP will initially pump and carry petroleum and gas from the Tilenga and Kingfisher projects located in Bunyoro, but Uganda’s richest oilfields are located in the Albertine Graben which is in Acholi and West Nile, along both sides of River Nile.
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On April 11, Uganda, Tanzania, Total and China National Offshore Oil Corporation (Cnooc) signed three agreements at State House Entebbe to develop Uganda’s oil and gas resources located in Bunyoro, Acholi and West Nile sub-regions.
The agreements which were subject of protracted negotiations for almost 15 years are the first concrete steps in efforts by the two EAC partner states to construct the 1443km East African Crude Oil Pipeline (EACOP) from Hoima to the Tanzanian port of Tanga. When completed, at a cost of $3.8 billion, it will be the longest heated pipeline in the world.
The latter is where UNRA and other agencies come in to support both production and commercialization of Uganda’s oil industry. Roads and bridges, the airport, water, electricity, among others, are the necessary support systems and entry point in the attainment of Uganda’s Final Investment Decision [FID].
Indeed, the strategies adopted were hinged on the signing of the FID, predicted as early as June 2019. With this deadline, and a cabinet directive in 2016 to implement the development of “Critical Oil Roads”, UNRA adopted the improvement of the level of service of such roads, procurement strategies of design and build and pre-financing of works in the first 12 months of signing the civil works contracts by the respective contractors to give enough time for Government of Uganda to secure the loan agreements.
by Mongabay.com on 19 April 2021
The $3.5 billion heated oil pipeline will connect oil fields in the Lake Albert basin in western Uganda to the port of Tanga on the Tanzanian coast.
Developed by French oil major Total and Chinese state-owned China National Offshore Oil Corporation, the project has faced staunch opposition from environmentalists who point out that it cuts through some of East Africa’s most biodiversity-rich areas.
The path of the pipeline will impact almost 2,000 square kilometers (770 square miles) of protected areas, a quarter of that the habitat of eastern chimpanzees and African savanna elephants, and displace more than 12,000 families.
Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni and Tanzanian President Samia Hassan Suluhu signed an agreement to contruct the East African Crude Oil Pipeline (EACOP).
The $3.55 billion pipeline will stretch from Uganda’s Albertine Graben region, where commercially viable oil deposits were discovered in 2006, to the Tanzanian port of Tanga. At 1,440 km, the pipeline will be the largest heated pipeline in the world and connect two oil fields the Kingfisher field, operated by China National Offshore Oil Corporation Ltd (CNOOC), and the Tilenga field, operated by Total S.A. Contruction is anticipated to take three years, opening up the pipeline for commercial use by 2025 at the earliest.