São Paulo – Egypt will auction 10 or 11 oil and gas exploration blocks in the Mediterranean, said this Tuesday (17), in Cairo, the country’s Petroleum minister, Tarek El Molla, according to information from news agency Reuters. The Egyptians also plan to auction blocks in the Red Sea by the end of 2018.
Reuters said the country is expecting to increase its output enough to attain self-sufficiency and stop importing oil by 2019.
Also regarding oil, the CEO of Algeria’s state-run company Sonatrach, Abdelmoumen Ould Kaddour, said in Oran that the company plans on doubling its capacity in ten years.
“We are attempting to become independent from this volatility in oil prices and to rely on volume instead,” Algérie Presse Service (APS) quoted him as saying. “By increasing output, we become less vulnerable to the effects of the oil price slump,” he said.
Translated by Sérgio Kakitani & Gabriel Pomerancblum
