The 1,400km (800 miles) East African Crude Oil Pipeline (EACOP) will tomorrow be launched by President Museveni and his Tanzanian counterpart, John Pombe Magufuli, the Foreign Affairs says.
The head of public diplomacy at Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Mrs Margret Kafeero, told TheUgandan on Friday that the $4bn (£2.8bn) project’s historical function will be held in Tanga on Saturday, August 5.
Uganda is expected to start pumping its oil to international markets in three years.
The two leaders had in May signed a communique agreeing to begin setting up the EACOP plan from Hoima in western Uganda to Tanga, a northern seaport city in Tanzania.
Uganda and Tanzania agreed last year that the 1,443-kilometre crude oil pipeline would go through the latter country after shelving plans to have it pass through Kenya.
The 24-inch diameter pipeline will be heated so it can keep highly viscous crude oil liquid enough to flow.
Completion of the pipeline is due in 2020 to coincide with the latest target date for first crude production – although slippage of both timetables is widely anticipated in light of the persistent upstream and downstream development delays since the discovery of oil in 2006.
30 000 bpd is envisaged feeding a greenfield refinery at Hoima. Implementation of the estimated US$4 billion downstream project remains in limbo following withdrawal of the putative foreign partner, Russia’s RT Resources, in the summer of last year.
