Minister of Petroleum and Mineral Resources, Karim Badawi, emphasized the importance of boosting investment in oil and gas exploration across Egypt’s onshore and offshore regions, particularly in the Western Desert. He stressed the need for efforts to accelerate natural gas production and leverage advanced technologies to enhance output and address challenges.
Badawi noted that these initiatives align with ongoing partnerships, especially with international companies like Apache. He highlighted the significance of utilizing the recently announced investment incentives, which are key mechanisms offered by the petroleum sector to encourage increased oil production, benefiting both the sector and its partners.
This came during the General Assembly meeting of Khalda Petroleum Company, the joint venture company for oil and gas production in the Western Desert between the Egyptian General Petroleum Corporation (EGPC) and Apache Corporation. The meeting was held via video conference to approve the results of fiscal year (FY)2023/24.
Khalda Petroleum Company Chairman, Saeed Abdel Moneim reviewed the most prominent performance indicators during 2023/24, explaining that the efforts of Khalda’s work teams to maintain and boost productivity, and to face challenges, were able to boost average production of crude oil, condensates and natural gas from the company’s fields in the Western Desert to 220,000 barrels of oil equivalent per day (boe/d). This comes as the company achieved an increase in crude oil production compared to FY 2022/23, which rose from about 113,600 barrels per day (b/d) to about 121,000 b/d, in addition to the production of condensates.
This is in light of the investments that were pumped in during the year, amounting to approximately $1.3 billion, to support exploration, production and field development efforts.
Abdel Moneim reviewed the results of the exploration, development and growth programs of the producing fields, where Khalda succeeded in reaching 23 successful exploration wells during the year, while the activities of developing and growing the producing fields included drilling 92 wells to support production in addition to implementing 133 well completion operations to raise the efficiency of their production of crude oil, condensates and gas.
Greg McDaniel, Acting Vice President and Country Manager for Apache’s Egypt Assets, confirmed that the company is focused on implementing and advancing modern technology in its operations in Egypt to support production, overcome challenges, and drive output growth.
