Doaa Farid
CAIRO - 13 January 2018: Egypt officially started operations of the Mediterranean’s giant gas field Zohr last month, less than two and a half years since its discovery
and is currently producing 350 million cubic feet a day.
Development works of Zohr went faster than scheduled, as the initial plan was to start production in 2019. But the government is now expecting self-sufficiency of natural gas before the end of 2018, with gas production amounting to 6 billion cubic feet a day. The 350 million cubic feet per day output is the first result of a series of phases in the field. Minister of Petroleum and Mineral Resources Tarek El Molla announced in late December that the first phase of the project would be finalized in June 2018, when production will hit more than 1 billion cubic feet a day. Zohr gas is now pumped through the national grid, processed at the Ministry of Petroleum’s gas treatment plant in Port Said. The newly added production capacity pushed up Egypt’s natural gas production to 5.5 billion cubic feet per day, up from 5.1 billion.
Discovered in 2015 by Italian energy company Eni, Zohr gas field covers an area of 100 square meters with a depth of 1,450 meters. Investing around $10 billion in the project, Eni estimates a total output of approximately 30 trillion cubic feet of gas. The new field will help secure energy needs of a country that consumes around 6 billion cubic feet of gas a day, with 65% of them going toward the electricity sector.
