By Deep Earth
Conjugate Energy Limited, the company that was registered in the United Kingdom in February 2023 to specifically hold the interests in the Kanywataba and Turaco oil exploration areas in Western Uganda, was dissolved on April 1, 2025 after financial woes plagued its parent company in Australia.
The United Kingdom’s registrar of companies decided to dissolve Conjugate, a subsidiary of Australia’s Armour Energy Limited, after repeated warnings over the company’s failure to file documents in accordance with UK laws.
Armour itself was dissolved in January 2024 as it buckled under the weight of debt.
The dissolution of Conjugate Energy throws the future of the Kanywataba and Turaco oil blocks in uncertainty, with the government of Uganda expected to reclaim the areas when their license periods expire.
While the Turaco project, whose license was issued in June 2023, has at least two more years until the middle of 2027, the Kanywataba license will have exhausted its second renewal period in May. Still, government can revoke the license if the company fails to meet the agreed field development plans.
For Uganda, the dissolution of Conjugate is a point of concern. Uganda has so far discovered between one billion and 1.4 billion barrels of recoverable oil.
However, this amount is not substantial enough to adequately feed both the crude oil export pipeline (EACOP) and the oil refinery – two projects that are being developed co-currently, and are expected to come on line before 2030.
Armour’s challenges started when it started picking up numerous assets in both Australia and outside, and yet it did not have the financial war-chest to execute the projects.
Over time, it became clear that it had bitten more than it could chew. The projects strained the company’s purse beyond its limit, forcing it into some strategic moves.
The market interpreted the incorporation of Conjugate as a move to shield the Kanywataba and Turaco oil projects from the cash troubles that the parent company was facing in Australia.
Energy Minister, Ruth Nankabirwa who recently hailed the positive advances in the EACOP and oil refinery projects will be disappointed by Conjugate’s folding
Armour also sold some of its assets in Australia to mobilise funds for its other projects, but even then the numbers just could not add up. DGR Global, another company in Australia, also held an 83.1 per cent interest in Armour.
At the time, the credit market for oil and gas projects – often perceived to be dirty and a threat to the environment – was shrinking as the global push for cleaner sources of energy gained momentum.
For Armour, pressure, precipitated by a slowdown in activities due to the Covid-19 pandemic, was mounting as creditors demanded for payments.
In November 2023, Armour was left with no choice but to go under receivership. This development sealed the fate of Conjugate, with the company simply running down the clock before it was itself dissolved.
There has not been any official announcement from Conjugate or from the government of Uganda over the dissolution of the company. However, for more than a year, we have posed questions to Uganda government officials about the future of Armour in Uganda, and their answer appears to have been chorused: “they are still meeting the conditions under their license”.
The registrar of companies in the UK now says that all property and rights vested in, or held in trust for, Conjugate “are deemed to be bona vacantia, and will belong to the Crown.”
Three months ago, DGR Global noted that in light of the uncertainty of any returns to creditors and shareholders from the liquidation process, the carrying amount of remaining shares and receivables [in Armour Energy] has been assessed as $nil.”
That was not the only pain that DGR Global faced. It lent Armour about $25 million, which it failed to recover.
In the past, Conjugate articulated its grand plans for Uganda in detail; strategies that would lead to a 25-year development programme. The company, using limited data from the seismic surveys it had undertaken in Uganda, estimated the net present value for both Kanywataba and Turaco to be $1.8 billion.
The company had been expected to have drilled at least three wells by the first quarter of 2025. Not a single well was ever drilled.
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