In the 2017/2018 financial year which began in July, Egypt plans to slash importation of liquefied natural gas to 80 from the 118 cargoes imported last year. The Petroleum Minister Tarek El Molla revealed this on Sunday.
Egypt has been trying to speed up the development of recent gas discoveries with a view to halting imports by 2019.
“We were planning to import 154 cargoes of LNG in 2016/17 but we only imported 118 cargoes because of the increase in local gas production,” Molla said.
There is high expectation to increase its LNG production by 1 billion cubic feet per day by the end of the current financial year to reach 6.2 billion cubic feet per day.
Gas production will get a big boost from Italian national oil company Eni’s Zohr field, discovered in 2015 with an estimated 30 trillion cubic feet of gas in place.
That field is expected to come into production at the end of 2017 and will save Egypt billions of dollars in hard currency that would otherwise be spent on imports.
