(Bloomberg) -- Uganda sees investors lined up for five oil blocks by the end of next year and expects to start producing crude as early as 2023.
The landlocked East African nation plans to build a pipeline to export its oil through neighboring Tanzania, Energy Minister Irene Muloni said in an interview in Dubai, where she is holding a roadshow to promote the licenses Uganda is offering.
“We hope by the end of next year, we will have new investors for these five blocks,” she said on Bloomberg Television. Uganda has also held roadshows in London and Houston, and Muloni said she is heading next to Russia to try to promote interest there.
International oil investors already working in Uganda -- including Total SA, CNOOC Ltd. and Tullow Oil Plc -- have spent more than $3 billion there, she said. Uganda has 6 billion barrels of oil reserves, of which 1.4 billion barrels is recoverable, Muloni said.
“Of course there is a lot of money that needs to be sunk into exploration and development before you go into production,” she said.
The government issued production licenses in an earlier investment round as well as in separate agreements with companies. Final investment decisions with Total, CNOOC and Tullow have been delayed, and Uganda now expects them by the first quarter of 2020, Muloni said.
--With assistance from Giovanni Prati and Tracy Alloway.
To contact the reporters on this story: Verity Ratcliffe in Dubai at vratcliffe1@bloomberg.net;Farah Elbahrawy in Dubai at felbahrawy@bloomberg.net;Yousef Gamal El-Din in Dubai at ygamaleldin@bloomberg.net
To contact the editors responsible for this story: Nayla Razzouk at nrazzouk2@bloomberg.net, Bruce Stanley
©2019 Bloomberg L.P.
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