Oil hub plans encourage explorers

摘要

East Africa is on track to become a crude production hub by 2020, boosted by progress on infrastructure projects and impressive exploration results. The Ugandan government issued a tender on 9 October for firms interested in building a 60,000 b/d refinery to process some of the output from onshore oil fields being developed by UK independent Tullow Oil, Total and China’s state-owned CNOOC in the Lake Albert basin. There has already been strong interest from potential investors, including Chinese state-controlled Sinopec, Ugandan energy minister Peter Lokeris says. Construction is scheduled to start in 2015 and finish in 2020. The refinery will cost an estimated $2.5bn and have an initial capacity of 30,000 b/d, due on stream in 2017-18 in time for first oil from Lake Albert.