Saipem drillship arrives in Egypt to work on Eni’s giant gas field

According to Egypt’s Ministry of Petroleum and Mineral Resources, the Saipem 10,000 drillship arrived in Egyptian waters on January 28, 2025, to spud two deepwater wells in Zohr field, situated 200 kilometers north of Port Said in the Shorouk area.

This comes after Karim Badawi, Minister of Petroleum and Mineral Resources, announced in a speech before the Senate that Zohr development activities would resume and drilling of two development wells would start in January, aiming to reach 220 million cubic feet of gas per day.

Discovered in 2015, the Zohr field was brought on stream in 2017. The field’s production reached 2 billion cubic feet per day (bcfd) in 2018 and 2.7 bcfd in 2019, when Eni hoped to reach the 3.2 bcfd target by the year’s end.

The Italian firm classifies the field as a supergiant, containing 480 million barrels of oil equivalent (mmboe). As far as natural gas is concerned, it is said to be the largest ever-discovered field in the Mediterranean.

In addition to Egypt, Eni has been busy in another African country-Côte d’Ivoire. In late December, the oil and gas giant kicked off production from Baleine Phase 2, which is the second stage of development of Baleine, one of the two largest discoveries to date in the country.