Uganda has replaced a missed mid-year target for first oil with a broad window ending next June, after the war in the Middle East held up equipment needed to finish its oilfields and export pipeline.

Kristina Kasebayo, head of compliance at Uganda National Oil Company, the state’s commercial arm in the oil sector, said on Thursday that production would start “before the end of our financial year”, which closes on June 30. The East African Crude Oil Pipeline, the 1,443km line that will carry the oil to Tanzania’s port of Tanga, was 92 per cent complete, she told the African Energy Week conference in Cape Town.

The statement presents June 2027 as Uganda’s first-oil timeline but does not name a production month. It confirms the broad deadline government officials gave Parliament in September after a July 31 target passed.

Ernest Rubondo, then executive director of the Petroleum Authority of Uganda, said in August that equipment for metering, electrical instrumentation and telecommunications had been delayed by the Middle East war. Some consignments loaded in the United Arab Emirates had to be removed at ports that came under attack and taken by road to safer ports in Oman, he said.

The revised window is a significant shift from the timetable operators gave earlier this year. Patrick Pouyanné, chief executive of TotalEnergies, the French energy group that operates the Tilenga field, told investors in April that Kingfisher could be ready by the northern-hemisphere summer, EACOP in September or October and production shortly after summer, with Tilenga following in the fourth quarter.

On the company’s second-quarter earnings call in July, he still expected crude production to start before the end of 2026, with Tilenga ramping up in the first half of 2027. CNOOC Uganda president Liu Xiangdong gave October as the target for the country’s first crude exports, according to a June Observer report.

The delay reflects the need to bring three linked projects into operation together. Updates provided to MPs this month put overall completion at 92 per cent for EACOP, 78 per cent for Tilenga and 90 per cent for the Kingfisher development.

Kingfisher’s central processing facility, one component of the wider development, was 99 per cent built by late September and had entered pre-commissioning. The field has enough completed wells to begin producing, but Sandra Santa Alum, the state minister for economic monitoring, said Kingfisher alone could not support commercial production.

Tilenga is designed to supply 190,000 barrels a day at peak, more than four times Kingfisher’s 40,000 barrels. Although drilling at both fields is ahead of the minimum required for first oil, the remaining processing, electrical and control systems must be completed before sustained production can begin.

Government officials told Parliament that EACOP should be ready to receive crude by mid-December, later than an earlier assessment that had flagged a late pipeline as a risk. That would not itself mark the start of exports, because the heated pipeline must be commissioned and filled before a cargo can be loaded at Tanga.

UNOC officials were working to a much earlier sales date only last month. Edith Tushabe, its head of commercial and business development, told S&P Global Commodity Insights on September 8 that the first shipment of Uganda’s Pearl Sweet crude was expected to load into a Suezmax tanker in December. Thursday’s statement did not say whether that target still stands or how long after production the first commercial export will follow.

The slippage narrows the period in which crude sales can generate revenue during the current financial year. Uganda’s budget assumed commercial production would begin later in 2026 and projected Shs1.8tn in petroleum revenue, including capital-gains tax, in 2026/27. Because the Treasury has not separated the tax component from expected oil receipts, the amount exposed to a later start remains unclear.

Amos Kankunda, chair of Parliament’s budget committee, said this month that MPs wanted to prevent another delay because budget projections rested on future petroleum revenue. When another MP asked in September whether production would start in January, March or April, Finance Minister Henry Musasizi declined to be more precise.

UNOC also said on Thursday that it aimed to take a final investment decision on Uganda’s planned domestic refinery in February 2027 and complete it by 2030. The refinery is a separate, less advanced project; the February decision would precede construction rather than mark its start.

Uganda discovered commercially viable oil in 2006. Its latest commitment leaves unanswered the question that has followed two decades of shifting targets: in which month will the first barrel flow?