The current energy landscape in Egypt is undergoing a significant transformation, with a growing focus on driving energy transition, ensuring energy security, and decarbonization. The Egypt Energy Show (EGYPES 2024) is a key event that highlights these priorities. Egypt is positioning itself as a regional energy hub, with a focus on climate-conscious strategies, including decarbonization and methane reduction. This comes as the Ministry of Petroleum and Mineral Resources (MoPMR) is working on diversifying energy sources and achieving sustainable development.
Energy Security in Egypt
Egypt faces several energy security challenges, including a growing domestic demand, reliance on natural gas for electricity generation, and the impact of climate change on energy supply and demand. To address these challenges, Egypt has been exploring various energy sources, such as solar, wind, shale gas, and Hydrogen.
Accordingly, Egypt is working to enhance energy security by diversifying the energy mix, increasing the use of renewable energy, and developing infrastructure to support the transition to a more sustainable and diverse energy sector. The country’s efforts and initiatives include boosting the share of renewable energy in its energy mix, with a target of 42% of total electricity production by 2035. Moreover, the country adopted the National Climate Change Strategy (NCCS) 2050, which aims to integrate climate resilience into infrastructure projects and diversify power generation technologies. The NCCS 2050 proposes integrating climate resilience into infrastructure projects and diversifying power generation to reduce the country’s dependence on fossil fuels.
Decarbonization Efforts
Egypt is exerting efforts to transition towards low-carbon energy sources, such as solar and wind power, and is exploring the potential of green hydrogen production to reduce reliance on hydrocarbons and meet its decarbonization goals. These efforts are crucial for Egypt to ensure energy security, meet its environmental targets, and contribute to the global transition to a more sustainable energy future.
As part of its Vision 2030 sustainable development strategy, Egypt aims to reduce greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions in the energy sector by 10% by 2030. Meanwhile, the MoPMR is committed to advancing its decarbonization agenda and collaborating with all stakeholders and partners to advance energy transition. This comes as the MoPMR has been sealing several methane management project agreements as well as green hydrogen Memoranda of Understanding (MoUs) and contracts. “The oil and gas sector is working to implement decarbonization projects to progressively lower the carbon footprint (carbon intensity) of the sector. The sector developed a six-year decarbonization projects plan with expected reductions of 8 million tons (mmt) of CO2 equivalent with investments reaching $600 million,” Minister of Petroleum and Mineral Resources, Tarek El Molla, told Egypt Oil & Gas in October 2023.
Egypt has further been encouraging the use of natural gas as a cleaner source of energy, and as a significant step towards energy transition. During 2023, the total number of housing units benefiting from natural gas across the country increased to about 14.5 million housing units, which raises the number of beneficiaries of the urban natural gas service to more than 62 million citizens. Additionally, MoPMR adopted a plan for the rapid spread of stations for fueling cars with compressed natural gas (CNG) on various roads and axes throughout the Republic, which contributed to a significant increase in the number of stations to nearly 1,000 stations serving about 534,000 gas-fueled cars.
Driving Energy Transition
As Egypt thrives toward a low-carbon future, the country in hosting the Egypt Energy Show (EGYPES 2024), which aims to accelerate the energy transition in Egypt. The event is supported by the Egyptian Ministry of Petroleum and Mineral Resources and will take place from February 19-21, 2024, at the Egypt International Exhibition Center in Cairo. The overarching theme of the event is “Driving Energy Transition, Security, and Decarbonization.”
EGYPES 2024 will host a multifaceted conference program, including the Future Energy Zone and Theatre, which will leave no aspect of energy transition unexplored. The event is expected to welcome over 35,000 attendees and 2,200 delegates from across the energy value chain to connect and explore business-critical avenues for growth.
The EGYPES 2024 conference and exhibition will further empower innovation as it features the CLIMATECH Challenge platform. The CLIMATECH Challenge serves as a global platform for start-up companies to introduce their business models and technological solutions in front of an influential judging committee panel. The platform is set to highlight pioneering start-ups that have cutting-edge solutions to accelerate the energy transition and features the role played by energy innovators in approaching net-zero targets.
