Egypt stops liquefied gas importation

CAIRO – 29 September 2018: Petroleum Minister Tarek al-Mulla announced on Saturday that the last shipment of liquefied gas arrived last week declaring that Egypt will no longer import because of achieving self-sufficiency.

The country’s daily production of gas rose this month to 6.6 billion cubic meters from six billion cubic meters in July 2017. The production has been growing since the operations of Zohr started in December. The daily production of the gas field increased six times from 350 million cubic feet to two billion.

Covering an area of 100 square meters with a depth of 1,450 meters, the field is one of the largest offshore gas fields discovered in 2015 in the Shorouq concession in the Mediterranean Sea by the Italian energy company Eni.

Eni announced last month a new gas discovery in the Western Desert. The depth of the well recorded 17,000 feet with several layers carrying gas. Furthermore, explorations are going on in the Red Sea and the Mediterranean.

Those have become possible after the demarcation agreements with Saudi Arabia in the Red Sea, and with Greece and Cyprus in the Mediterranean in 2015 and 2017 respectively.
Egypt is deploying efforts to become a regional energy hub as 64 billion cubic meters supplied from Israel’s Tamar and Leviathan natural gas reservoirs will be liquefied in Egypt in the duration of a decade starting 2019. The deal’s value with the private Egyptian company Dolphinus Holdings is $15 billion.