The Minister of Petroleum and Mineral Resources, Tarek El Molla, stressed the cruciality of supporting cooperation endeavors among the African countries, which comes in line with the African Union vision 2063, in a speech on behalf of President Abdel Fattah El Sisi, according to a press release.

This came during the Fifth Summit of Heads of State and Government of the Gas Exporting Countries Forum (GECF), which was held in Malabo, Equatorial Guinea on November 29th.

El Molla highlighted that the GECF was convened on time to open in-depth dialogues among the participating countries to face the increasing challenges the world has been witnessing recently.

Furthermore, El Molla shed the light on the importance of energy security and enhancing its accessibility to accomplish the forum’s main goal of maintaining an appropriate environment for investments that achieves common interests of producers, consumers, and international companies.

During the speech, the minister mentioned that, through the implementation of the economic reform program, Egypt succeeded in achieving the best growth domestic product (GDP) rate of around 5.6%. Additionally, the inflation rate declined to 13.4%, as an average for 2018/19. Also, the foreign exchange reserves rose to $45 billion in September, compared to $13 billion in 2013.

Moreover, he pointed out that Egypt’s economic and political stability played a major role in achieving unprecedented improvements in the oil and gas sector. During the last five years, 27 projects were implemented to develop natural gas fields, with investments of around $21 billion. This led to increasing natural gas production to 7.2 billion cubic feet per day (bcf/d), especially after the discovery of Zohr field.

Furthermore, El Molla noted that the last two years witnessed solid steps towards turning Egypt into a regional gas hub. He clarified that Egypt’s continuing efforts were crowned by the establishment of the East Mediterranean Gas Forum (EMGF) to intensify cooperation among member countries and to optimize the region’s natural gas potential.

The minister declared that Egypt’s main message is to exploit our oil and gas resources in a way that can help spread peace and supporting humanitarianism.