Developments of Egypt’s supergiant gas field Zohr rise to 91%

Developments in Egypt’s supergiant gas field Zohr has risen to around 91 percent, the country’s oil minister Tarek el-Molla said Sunday.

Discovered in 2015 by Italy’s Eni with an estimated 30 trillion cubic feet of gas, the Zohr field is due to start producing in December.

Work on developing the field, which was discovered by Italian oil company Eni, aims to link the wells of the first stage to produce the targeted gas on time, the head of Petro Shourouk, which is working on the developments, told the petroleum minister in a meeting.

Zohr is expected to produce some 500 million square feet (46.5 million cubic metres) of gas by the end of 2017, Eni CEO Claudio Descalzi said earlier in August.

Total output from the field by the end of Eni’s project is estimated to reach 2.7 billion square feet (250.8 million cubic metres), Descalzi added.

The company’s chief said that half of Eni’s 2018 investment, amounting to $3.5 billion, will be pumped into Egypt.

The country has been seeking to speed up production from recently discovered fields, with an eye to halting imports by 2019 and achieving self-sufficiency.

The field should help alleviate Egypt’s severe energy shortage and save the country billions of dollars spent on imports.