Time flies with great content! Renew in to keep enjoying all our premium content.
Prime
Gulf Energy submits revised plan for Turkana oil project with race for approval on
Director General of Epra, Daniel Kiptoo speaks during a Media Roundtable meeting held by the regulator on May 23, 2024, at Sarova PanAfric Hotel in Nairobi.
Gulf Energy has submitted a revised plan on how it intends to commercially tap oil in South Lokichar, Turkana with the State racing to ensure that it approves it by end of December this year.
Mr Daniel Kiptoo, the Director General of the Energy and Petroleum Regulatory Authority (Epra), said Gulf presented a slightly amended Field Development Plan (FDP) on September 30, 2025.
The proposal was built on Gulf's predecessor Tullow Oil Plc which is based in London. Gulf took over full ownership of the South Lokichar oil project from the British firm in a deal worth $120 million (Sh15.5 billion) with the change in ownership prompting a review of the FDP.
Mr Kiptoo added that Gulf has made minor changes to the FDP that had been drawn by Tullow. He did not divulge these changes. The government had in the past raised concerns about the technical and financial gaps in Tullow’s FDP.
Approval of the plan is crucial to helping tap investors to de-risk the project and commercially unlock the oil in blocks 10BA, 10BB, and 13T more than two decades since discovery.
“They submitted a revised FDP on the last day of last month (September 30) and we have started the process of reviewing it. There are minor amendments to the FDP presented by Tullow,” Mr Kiptoo told this publication.
“Timeliness on when we have to review it and give feedback to Cabinet have not changed. Remember we postponed this (approval of the FDP) two times and we need to finally move.”
Epra and the Ministry of Energy are expected to review the FDP and forward their recommendations to the Cabinet for adoption and later Parliament for approval.
Parliament had earlier set a deadline of June this year for review and approval but extended this by six months after change in ownership. An FDP outlines how an oil exploration firm intends to develop a petroleum field, production forecasts and costs. It also includes a plan on how the company intends to manage the impact on the environment.
Kenya is banking on Gulf to finally become an oil exporter, ending a wait of more than two decades since the country discovered oil.
Joint efforts by Tullow and the government of Kenya to secure investors from China, India, United Kingdom and Indonesia failed over the past decade, dampening Kenya’s prospects of becoming an oil exporter.
The Ministry of Energy has previously said that Kenya needs an estimated $3.4 billion (Sh439.3 billion) to build infrastructure like storage tanks for the Turkana oil.
The country is racing to become the second oil exporting economy in East Africa, after Uganda which targets to ship its first batch of commercially viable oil by 2027.
