CAIRO: Egypt's state-owned Egyptian Natural Gas Holding Company (EGAS) will offer up 19 areas for exploration this year in international tenders, a newspaper reported on Wednesday. "It is planned to offer 17 areas to search for gas in the Mediterranean Sea and two land areas in the Nile Delta," Al-Masry Al-Youm paper cited the head of the company, Mahmoud Latif, as saying during a company meeting on Tuesday. The company expects a 7 percent increase in domestic consumption of gas to 35.5 million tons in the 2010/2011 fiscal year, the paper cited an EGAS report as saying. Egypt emerged as a significant natural gas producer in the past decade, swiftly developing mainly offshore Mediterranean gas reserves. It exported its first liquefied natural gas (LNG) cargo early in 2005 and boosted foreign sales by pipeline. Proven reserves soared to 2.19 trillion cubic meters at the end of 2009 from 1.22 trillion 10 years earlier and just 0.35 trillion in 1989, according to BP's 2010 Statistical Review of World Energy. Hopes for a step-change in exports grew in July when Egypt signed a $9 billion deal for BP and RWE Dea to develop two fields near the port city of Alexandria on terms that made deepwater Mediterranean drilling more commercially appealing.
