CAIRO: Dana Gas, a United Arab Emirates-based private natural gas company, made a net profit of 392 million dirhams for the second quarter of 2009, up from 34 million dirhams during the comparable period last year. Revenue from the sale of hydrocarbons reached 303 million dirhams, pushing gross profits up 31 percent to 97 million dirhams, mainly due to condensate sales from the company's operations in Iraq's Kurdistan region, the company said in a statement. The company's net profit for the first half of the year totaled 360 million dirhams, with total revenues of 550 million dirhams. Dana Gas's Egypt ended the quarter with a production of 3.19 million barrels of oil equivalent (MMboe), as the coming on stream of the El-Basant and Sondos fields pushed the company's production rate from 30,000 boepd to 37,000 boepd. "Dana Gas's Egypt operations contributed significantly to the results, the statement read. The company's newly discovered Tulip-1 exploration, located in the West Qantara Concession in the Nile Delta region, is expected to add approximately 27 billion cubic feet (bcf) of gas reserves. Also, three successful appraisals - Sondos-2, El Basant-3 and Salma Delta-2 - confirmed expected reserves extension, the firm said. Two more exploration gas discoveries were made shortly after the end of the second quarter, Sharabas-1 and Sama-1 in the West Manzala and West Qantara concessions, respectively. "In Egypt, we continued with our exploration success and significantly increased our production rate. .During the first half our production rate in Egypt increased beyond 37,000 barrels of oil equivalent per day (boepd), from 31,650 boepd at the end of 2008. The new Sama-1 discovery which will push [production] up to 40,000 boepd, Dana Gas CEO Ahmed Al-Arbeed said. During the second quarter, Dana Gas entered into partnership agreements - for the Kurdistan region of Iraq - with two central European integrated oil and gas groups: OMV, Austria s largest listed industrial company, and MOL, Hungary's largest listed company. Headquartered in Sharjah, UAE, the company is listed on the Abu Dhabi Securities Exchange (ADX) and has offices in Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, the Kurdistan Region of Iraq, Egypt and the UK. -Daily News Egypt
