The Egyptian government has invested more than 7 billion pounds in establishing a complex for the production of high-octane fields in Assiut Governorate, in the south of the country, according to Egyptian Petroleum Minister Tariq El-Molla in a speech on Egyptian television on Wednesday.
The production capacity of the largest petroleum complex in Upper Egypt is 800,000 tons, and represents 13% of the country’s production of gasoline, and the complex will cover the entire needs of Upper Egypt’s petroleum.
The complex will contribute to reducing the country’s gasoline import rates by 15-20% from the current rates, and Egypt has 8 refineries for petroleum products.
The total investments of the petroleum sector in Egypt, whether locally or by foreign investors, in the projects that have been operated, underway and under study, amounted to about 1.2 trillion pounds during the past seven years, according to data from the Egyptian Ministry of Petroleum.
“The new projects have raised the volume of our gasoline production 55% to 6 million tons annually from 3.9 million tons in 2014,” according to Tarek El-Molla.
Egypt’s production of crude oil is currently about 575,000 barrels per day, and Egypt became a net exporter of natural gas and liquefied gas in 2018 after the discovery of the giant Zohr gas field – the largest in the Mediterranean, and the current production of natural gas is between 6.5 to 7 billion feet cubic meters of natural gas per day.