President Sisi to attend Cyprus Trilateral Summit next month

CAIRO – 16 October 2017: President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi will head to the Cypriot capital Nicosia in November to participate in the Trilateral Summit of Egypt, Cyprus and Greece and hold talks on mutual cooperation and projects. The president is also expected to visit France soon.

In 2015, Greece, Egypt and Cyprus agreed to speed up talks to demarcate sea boundaries in the Eastern Mediterranean as part of efforts to turn the region into an offshore natural gas hub, according to Reuters.

The Mediterranean’s largest gas field, Zohr, is now 91 percent complete, as work is proceeding on schedule, Minister of Petroleum Tarek El-Molla said Sunday.

The second phase of the project is scheduled to start after the first phase begins production by the end of 2017, Molla added.

A set of practical experiments are expected to be conducted at Zohr before the end of October to produce an estimated 350 million cubic feet (MMCF) of gas per day and to be increased up to 1,000 MMCF by the end of 2017.

Zohr is the largest natural gas field found in the Mediterranean and was discovered in 2015 by Italy’s Eni. The field has an area of 100 square meters at a depth of 1,450 meters.
Investing around $10 billion in the project, Eni is estimating total output of the field to be approximately 30 trillion cubic feet of gas.

The field will start production in three phases. The first phase will see an output of one billion cubic feet per day. When all seven fields are complete by 2019, this amount will increase to 2.7 billion cubic feet per day.

The field is expected to secure Egypt’s domestic needs of gas after it has become a net importer of gas following a cut in production after the January revolution.