RWE Dea Celebrates 25 Years of Production at Ras Budran

RWE Dea

Anniversary in Egypt: For 25 years now, RWE Dea has been producing crude oil from the offshore field Ras Budran via its holding in joint venture Suez Oil Company (SUCO). Approx. 267 million barrels of crude have been produced to date.

The crude oil reservoir Ras Budran is located in the Gulf of Suez, four kilometers off the coast of Sinai, and was discovered in the mid-1970s. To develop the field, SUCO was founded as a joint venture between RWE Dea as operator and the Egyptian General Petroleum Corporation (EGPC). Production commenced here in 1983 with some 60,000 barrels/day. By now a total of about 267 million barrels of crude have been produced, supplemented by a further 6.000 barrels each day. The total production from Ras Budran and the oilfields Zeit Bay and Ras Fanar amounts to six million barrels per annum.


Investment planned

"Our successful production from these fields, continually upgraded to meet state-of-the-art technology, we managed to contribute to keeping our crude oil production in Egypt at a high level", explained Thomas Rappuhn, member of the Board of Management of RWE Dea. In the past thirty years, the joint venture partners invested some 3.2 billion US dollars in developing the Ras Budran, Zeit Bay and Ras Fanar fields. This makes RWE Dea one of the biggest German investors in the country. Only last year were the production concessions for the oil production areas in the Gulf of Suez renewed by a further ten years, with additional capital spending being earmarked for further development. "Our efficient oil production from these fields provides us with a continual cash flow that we can re-invest in promising natural gas projects in Egypt, for instance," said Hans-Hermann Andreae, General Manger of RWE Dea in Egypt. This made it possible to stabilize production from the Zeit Bay crude oil field with additional widely deviated wells being drilled from onshore. The company recently announced the discovery of a natural gas and condensate field in the onshore concession Disouq. The launch of the offshore gas field development in the North Idku concession, in turn, is the first step taken so far to develop the gas reserves discovered by the company in the Nile delta both as operator and partner. In 2008 alone, RWE Dea plans to spend some 440 million US dollars on exploration and production activities in Egypt.


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