As Uganda advances toward its aim to begin oil production in 2025, the first oil drilling program has been launched in the east African country recently.

The Petroleum Authority of Uganda, PAU, announced on Twitter that Uganda’s President, Yoweri Museveni, “has officially commissioned the start of the drilling campaign on the Kingfisher oilfield.”

The Kingfisher field is part of the ten-billion-dollar arrangement to advance Uganda’s oil reserves under Lake Albert, west of the country, and build a massive pipeline to move the crude into the global markets through an Indian Ocean route in Tanzania.

Commercial amounts of petroleum had been found in one of the world’s most biodiverse areas nearly two decades ago, but production remained stalled by infrastructural deficits.

The Kingfisher field, run by the state-owned China National Offshore Oil Corporation, CNOOC, in its peak performance, is projected to yield 40,000 barrels of oil per day, PAU mentioned.

The country’s energy minister, Ruth Nankabirwa, told journalists recently how excited the country and continent are about the development.

The Petroleum Authority of Uganda, PAU, the petroleum sector’s official regulator, said President Yoweri Museveni strategically sited the program in the Kingfisher project zone, one of the country’s two profitable oil development areas.

France’s TotalEnergies, which co-owns all of Uganda’s existing oilfields together with the state-run Uganda National Oil Company, UNOC, and China National Offshore Oil Corporation, CNOOC, operate Uganda’s second project site, Tilenga, which was discovered in 2008, north of Lake Albert, on both sides of the River Nile.

While the country’s crude contents are pegged at 6.5 billion barrels, when it all peaks, Uganda ultimately plans to put out about 230,000 barrels of crude oil daily.