Egypt’s President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi has approved six new oil and gas exploration contracts for investments worth at least $2.2bn.
The Oil Ministry said in a statement on Tuesday that the agreements include the search for oil and gas in the Mediterranean, Nile Delta, Western Desert and the Gulf of Suez.
The deals were initially mooted at an international investment conference in Sharm El Sheikh earlier this year.
Egypt has already awarded four new licences to explore oil and gas off its Mediterranean coast.
Egypt’s state gas company EGAS in a statement says it had awarded a licence each to Britain’s BP and Italy’s Edison. A consortium involving BP and Italian major Eni’s Egyptian subsidiary had also picked up a bloc, as has another consortium involving Eni, BP and France’s Total.
The EGAS statement said the new concessions would see the companies making total investments of at least $306mn, conducting seismic studies and sinking eight discovery wells.
The move by the Egyptian government comes weeks after Eni’s giant Zohr gas find renewed international interest in the area. Eni announced in late August it had discovered the largest known gas field in the Mediterranean off the Egyptian coast.
Eni predicts that the Zohr field could hold 30 trillion cubic feet of gas, covering an area of about 100km2.
The Zohr find is likely to encourage oil majors to look more carefully at the eastern Mediterranean region, which has yielded some significant discoveries in recent years.
