Museveni to flag off Kampala Storage Terminal construction
According to the Uganda National Oil Company (UNOC), the terminal, to be developed on a 300-acre site at Namwabula, about 26km west of Kampala, will have capacity to store up to 320 million litres of petroleum products.
President Yoweri Museveni. (File)
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President Yoweri Museveni will on Thursday, September 17, preside over the groundbreaking ceremony for the $309.7m (sh1.2 trillion) Kampala Storage Terminal (KST) in Mpigi district, marking another major step in Uganda’s efforts to strengthen petroleum storage and distribution.
According to the Uganda National Oil Company (UNOC), the terminal, to be developed on a 300-acre site at Namwabula, about 26km west of Kampala, will have capacity to store up to 320 million litres of petroleum products.
KST is expected to receive both imported and locally refined petroleum products and supply Kampala, the central region and other parts of the country.
It will also provide capacity for strategic petroleum reserves and hospitality storage for oil marketing companies.
Uganda currently consumes more than 240 million litres of petroleum products every month, according to UNOC. The new terminal will complement the existing Jinja Storage Terminal and is expected to improve the country’s resilience to prolonged disruptions in petroleum supplies.
UNOC, which owns 100% of KST, will operate the facility once it is commissioned.
The KST project is also designed to become a key link in Uganda’s emerging domestic petroleum supply chain.
The terminal will include the planned Mpigi Remote Refinery Terminal (MRRT), which will receive petroleum products through a proposed pipeline from Hoima, direct them into storage and facilitate onward distribution.
The MRRT will also include receipt tanks for products from the planned Hoima refinery.
Once the proposed 60,000-barrel-per-day refinery at Kabaale in Hoima district becomes operational, locally refined petroleum products are expected to be transported to KST through the proposed Hoima-Buloba products pipeline.
The refinery, pipeline, MRRT and KST are therefore expected to form an integrated network for moving locally refined petroleum products from Hoima to consumers across Uganda.
The groundbreaking comes barely two weeks after Museveni named Uganda’s crude oil Pearl Sweet on September 2, another milestone in the country’s journey towards First Oil.
During the naming ceremony, Museveni reiterated the Government’s position that Uganda should refine its crude oil locally, arguing that domestic refining would reduce costs associated with importing finished petroleum products.
“Our refinery will be one of the most profitable because, first of all, it’s far from the ocean and it does not have the transportation cost which imported oil has. When we refine our oil here, you don’t pay transit charges,” he said.
KST is intended to support this strategy by providing the storage and distribution infrastructure required once domestic refining begins.
Museveni has also said Uganda’s oil and gas sector should be used to accelerate industrialisation.
He noted that only about 40% of the Lake Albert Basin had so far been explored, with confirmed resources of 6.5 billion barrels.
The KST project consequently adds another component to Uganda’s growing petroleum infrastructure, linking crude oil production and refining in the Albertine region to the storage and distribution systems needed to supply the domestic market.