by Maye Kabil 

CAIRO, Nov. 24 (Aswat Masriya) – The Egyptian General Petroleum Corporation (EGPC) held a meeting with oil and natural gas Italian Company Eni earlier this week to negotiate the price of gas extracted from Zohr field, said EGPC’s CEO Mohamed Al Masri.

“The price ranges from $4 to $5.88 per 1 million British thermal units (BTU) and will not exceed this range," Masri told reporters on the sidelines of the INTERGAS-VII, Oil, Gas and petrochemicals conference, which kicked off Tuesday and will end on Thursday.

Eni announced last August the discovery of one of largest natural gas reserves in the Mediterranean, located in Shorouk Block.

Zohr is also the second largest gas discovery in the world in the past decade, according to Khaled Abu Bakr, the middle east coordinator of the international gas union, in his speech at the conference.

Masri said “we agreed with Eni to start production in 2017, at a capacity of up to one billion cubic feet of gas daily."

The agreement guarantees an increase in production to 2.7 billion cubic feet of gas per day by 2019.

The Zohr gas reserve holds 30 trillion cubic feet of lean gas. 

Eni is expected to pump between $6 and $10 billion worth of investments in Zohr.

Masri said that the Italian company Edison will complete the seismic survey (which reveals the size of the reserves in the field) adjacent to ??Eni’s Shorouk field within the next month.

The survey was expected to be completed over the course of a year and a half, but the discovery pushed other companies to speed up the process of research and prospecting, said Masri.