BP starts gas production at Egypt’s Fayoum-4 well two years ahead of schedule

BP has started producing natural gas from its Fayoum-4 well in Egypt’s West Nile Delta concession, adding an estimated 80 million cubic feet per day to the national grid, the Egyptian Ministry of Petroleum and Mineral Resources said on Monday.

The ministry said the well came online nearly two years ahead of schedule, calling it part of a broader push to speed up field development and connect new wells to production faster.

BP reached the gas by drilling a sidetrack from an existing wellbore down to about 3,000 metres, tapping newly identified Messinian-age reservoir layers without drilling a separate well or building new subsea infrastructure and cutting the time needed to bring the gas online, the ministry said.

Output is being routed to West Nile Delta’s processing plants through the Giza-Fayoum pipeline.

BP operates West Nile Delta with an 82.75 per cent stake, while Harbour Energy holds the remainder. That split is between the two foreign partners only as the state’s stake in the gas comes separately, through royalties and a production-sharing agreement with national Egyptian Natural Gas Holding Company (EGAS).

The new volumes arrive as Egypt continues to grapple with a years-long decline in domestic gas output. Production has fallen by about 30 per cent since 2021, due largely to a slowdown at the giant Zohr field, and averaged under 4.4 billion cubic feet per day in the fiscal year that ended in June, according to industry estimates.

Demand, by contrast, can climb as high as 7.2 billion cubic feet per day during peak summer months, and Egypt has increasingly been closing the gap with imports comprising liquefied natural gas (LNG) cargoes alongside pipeline supplies from Israel, bringing in about 985 billion cubic feet in the last fiscal year, a figure projected to rise to 1,000 billion cubic feet in the current one.

Those imports carry a significant cost for a government managing tight foreign-currency reserves, giving Cairo added incentive to accelerate new production wherever possible.