British Petroleum (BP) CEO Bob Dudley told CNBC that in the past two years, the company has invested more money in Egypt than in any other country, and said that BP would spend around $1.8bn in Egypt in 2019.Â
“Today (the scale of our operations) is very big,” Dudley told CNBC. “We produce oil in the Gulf of Suez but really our focus in the last five years has been this big push for natural gas. All across from the Nile Delta, to the east, to the west of the Nile Delta, it’s helping power the country and other companies are here as well.”
Egypt’s strong push into gas production, with mega fields like Zohr, has certainly had a large role in this, and the nation aims to become a net gas exporter by the end of 2019. At the Egypt Petroleum Show in Cairo, BP announced that it achieved first gas production from the second phase of the West Nile Delta development.
Production from the third phase of the project is expected by late 2019–the company says that combined production from the three phases of the project to reach almost 1.4bn cubic feet per day by the end of 2019, which will go into the national gas grid, CNBC reported.
“We’ve seen this big change over the last four or five years that has fundamentally changed things,” Dudley told CNBC. “You go back, five or seven, eight years ago and electricity wasn’t even assured each day and now the infrastructure’s here … You’re actually seeing Egypt move from a producing country into one that’s going to begin to export energy as well and become a Mediterranean hub, it’s very exciting.”
