Uganda announces historic 600-million-barrel crude discovery

Uganda has announced a historic discovery of an estimated 650 million barrels of crude oil in the Kasuruban Block.

The find represents a major leap for the country’s oil sector, which has long lagged behind other emerging African oil producers, such as Nigeria.

The state-owned Uganda National Oil Company, UNOC, disclosed this in a statement issued on Wednesday. The company identified nine potential oil wells within the Kasuruban Block, confirming “significant new crude oil deposits”.

Preliminary assessments indicate that the wells could contain about 600 million barrels of recoverable crude, a development that would significantly expand Uganda’s proven reserves and reshape expectations for the Albertine Rift Basin, one of East Africa’s key hydrocarbon zones.

The discoveries were made within the 1,285-square-kilometre Kasuruban exploration block, which UNOC acquired in 2023 under a production-sharing agreement with the government.

Although detailed seismic and drilling data were not released, the announcement — shared on the company’s official X account — ranks among the largest resource additions since the initial Lake Albert discoveries in the mid-2000s.

The development comes as Uganda intensifies work on the Tilenga and Kingfisher oil fields, operated by France’s TotalEnergies and China’s CNOOC.

Commercial production from both projects is scheduled to commence in the second half of 2026, with output expected to peak at approximately 200,000 barrels per day.