Molla: New int'l companies to pump investments in Red Sea in 2019

CAIRO: 24 January 2019: Petroleum Minister Tareq el Molla said new international companies are planning to pump investments in oil exploration in the Red Sea region in the coming period.

This came at a general assembly meeting of South Valley Egyptian Holding Company for Petroleum (Ganope) to endorse the proposed budget for the fiscal year 2019/2020.

In a statement on Thursday, the minister said that Egypt has started exploring oil and gas in Red Sea following the signing of the Egyptian-Saudi maritime border demarcation agreement.

Ganope’s chairperson Mohamed Abdel Azim said new companies will drill nine exploratory wells in the second half of FY 2018/2019 and the FY 2019/2020 with the view to reaching an average production rate of about 25,000 barrels per day (bpd).

Earlier, the petroleum Minister said that a seismic survey for 10,000 km in the Red Sea region was completed ahead of the launch of a global bid for oil and gas exploration in the Red Sea.

The bid will be put forth after obtaining the results of the Geophysical Data Collection Project in the Red Sea.

The project is carried out in cooperation with South Valley Egyptian Petroleum Holding Company (GANOPE) and the Norwegian geophysical company TGS and Texas-based Schlumberger.

In July, the Petroleum Ministry, represented by GANOPE, signed an agreement with Schlumberger and TGS to provide the government with geo-science data for exploring and producing oil and gas.

The unexplored offshore Egyptian Red Sea area is made up of large, untested structures and well-established hydrocarbon systems, which offer exceptional growth opportunities for oil companies," CEO of TGS Kristian Johansen said earlier.

According to the company, the First 2D data volumes will be available Q3 2018 and the Final data volumes for prestack time-migrated (PSTM) data and prestack depth-migrated (PSDM) data will be available in Q4 2018 and Q1 2019 respectively.