According to Energy and Petroleum Cabinet Secretary Davis Chirchir, this would guarantee daily trips rather than the country's present weekly excursions. Kenya was started in early January but has barely transported 20 million liters of petroleum products.
Chirchir added that despite the Ksh2 billion ($14.57 million) project's underutilization, the government is on pace to reclaim its market share of oil exports from East Africa. “We have embarked on building three more ships so that the jetty can be doing shipments daily,” he said.
The fuel is delivered to the Mahathi terminal in Entebbe, where it is loaded onto trucks bound for the Democratic Republic of the Congo, South Sudan, Burundi, and Rwanda.
The haulage across the lake, according to Chirchir, would not only be cost-effective but also assist lessen traffic on the roads and increase supply reliability. The minister claims that 135 trucks can be transported across the lake by a single ship with a capacity to transport 4.5 million liters of oil products.
Following a visit to the Kenya Pipeline Company's 95-meter-long oil-loading jetty, Chirchir gave a speech in Kisumu last week. Joe Sang, managing director of the Kenya Pipeline Company (KPC) and the Liban Pipeline Company, was with him.
“We are here to witness and confirm the work done by KPC to facilitate the shipment of transit goods to Uganda for onward movement to other landlocked countries,” the minister stated. In order to optimize the benefits, he also indicated that infrastructural improvements in the petroleum export sector still need to be made.
“You are aware that we are obligated to serve the landlocked countries and it is our obligation to utilize this state-of-the-art facility which should have come up much earlier. We have also sought the services of a Chinese contractor opening up the road so we can also move the trucks quickly,” Davis Chirchir said.
The oil jetty's construction was finished in February 2018, but it wasn't used until January 2023 since a similar facility in Uganda had to be built first.
The five-year wait was finally over on January 3, when the first shipment of petroleum products through the MV Kabaka Mutebi II landed at the Mahathi jetty.
