Cnooc yet to make use of oil field in Hoima
Workers undertake the first flaring test at the Waraga 1 well in Kaiso-Tonya in Hoima District. Despite acquiring a conditional licence, CNOOC is yet to operationalize Kingfisher oil filed.
Kampala. With the first oil production not expected until around 2019/2020, pending final investment decisions on the Greenfield oil refinery and a crude export pipeline, Chinese’s oil company, Cnooc, is also taking its time on the Kingfisher oil field (Block EA-3A).
The company is currently rethinking most of its earlier conceptual designs for the oil field, undertaking surveys for feeder pipelines that will evacuate crude oil from the Kingfisher to the refinery and baseline studies for the installation facilities.
This is on top of collecting of more data on the oil wells that will feed into the next phase, Front End Engineering & Design (FEED) that will, among other things, look at estimated costs of the required infrastructure to start production, layout of well pads, and analysis on central processing facilities with a capacity of 20,000 barrels per day.
Government, in 2012, granted a conditional production licence for Kingfisher shortly before UK’s Tullow Oil PLC farmed down 66.66 per cent of its interests in the Albertine to Cnooc and France’s Total E&P under a joint venture partnership but pending fulfilment of several “conditions.” The partners agreed that Cnooc takes over Kingfisher.
The commissioner for field development at the Petroleum Directorate, Mr Fred Kabanda, said the company upon fulfilment of the conditions in September 2013, embarked on a campaign of further data acquisition from the field to optimise its development.
“To this end, Cnooc drilled a pre-development well, Kingfisher-4 which was completed in January 2015,” Mr Kabanda said in a statement to this newspaper.
He added: “Interpretation of this data acquired from Kingfisher-4 is being finalised and will subsequently be used to optimise the FEED for the project.” In addition, the Environment Impact Assessments for the field are ongoing and expected to take another six months.
“These environmental requirements need to be carried out before the developments take place as they examine the potential impact from the different aspects of this development and explore mitigation measures where necessary.”
Refinery work
A Russian consortium, RT Global Resources, led by Rostec, is currently finalising negotiations with government for the $4.5b (Shs16 trillion) oil refinery.
Construction of the first phase of the refinery, 30,000 barrels per day (bpd), is expected to be completed by 2018/2019. Another phase 30,000 bpd phase will be subsequently added around 2022.
