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Egypt signed 14 exploration and production (E&P) deals between March and October this year, and its oil and gas sector has attracted $75 billion in investments to date, according to Tarek El Molla, Minister of Petroleum and Mineral Resources Tarek El Molla.
In his keynote speech at the ADIPEC on Sunday, he attributed the deals to sectoral reforms initiated more than six years ago to unlock the oil and gas sector’s full value chain potential. Last year, Egypt decided to remove subsidies on most energy products as it neared the end of a three-year $12-billion IMF loan programme.
“The reforms were extremely beneficial for the Egyptian economy, with an estimated $75 billion worth of investments during the period 2014 to 2020,” the energy minister said.
The reforms proved their efficiency and sustainability amid the economic challenges due to the COVID-19 outbreak.
“During the period from March to October 2020, the Ministry signed 14 new exploration concession agreements. [The] current challenges also didn’t hinder the President Abdel Fattah Al-Sisi from inaugurating two of the largest petroleum refining projects in the Middle East and Africa region.”
Over the past six years, Egypt has also finalised 86 agreements with international oil companies with minimum investment commitments totalling $15 billion.
“In 2019, we were able to attract the super major oil companies Chevron and ExxonMobil to Egypt’s upstream activities, which has raised the total number of international companies working in the oil exploration sector to more than 60 in 164 areas.”
The minister pointed that the two completed projects, worth a combined $4.5 billion, together with three major ongoing refining projects totalling $5.7 billion, would help Egypt achieve self-sufficiency in petroleum products by 2023.
Egypt is in the process of launching the Egyptian upstream gateway, a digital subsurface platform to act as an up-to-date repository of the country’s subsurface data.
“The project aims to digitally promote Egypt’s oil and gas bid rounds through seamless online access to the sector’s data as well as endorsing our exploration and production potential worldwide.”
(Writing by Anoop Menon; editing by Seban Scaria)
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© ZAWYA 2020
