Eni has begun commissioning the second phase of its Meleiha gas project in Egypt, a facility designed to process up to 100 million cubic feet per day of natural gas. The move is a direct response to Egypt's deteriorating domestic gas supply position, which has forced the country to shift from a net LNG exporter to a significant importer in recent years.
Egypt's gas production has been in decline for several years, creating growing pressure on the national grid and accelerating the country's reliance on costly LNG cargo imports. The Meleiha project forms part of a broader national effort to reverse that trend by unlocking incremental processing capacity from existing acreage rather than waiting on frontier exploration. Commissioning the second phase signals that Eni and its Egyptian partners are prioritising near-term deliverability over longer development cycles.
The Meleiha concession sits in Egypt's Western Desert, a mature hydrocarbon province where Eni has operated for decades. Phase 2 adds meaningful throughput to existing infrastructure at a time when Cairo is under fiscal pressure from its import bill. Egyptian authorities, including the state oil company Egyptian General Petroleum Corporation, have been pushing international operators across the country's portfolio to accelerate tie-backs and debottleneck processing plants rather than defer capital spend. Meleiha Phase 2 fits squarely within that push.
For Norway's oil and gas service sector, the story illustrates a wider pattern playing out across North Africa: operators are sweating mature assets and expanding surface processing capacity to compensate for reservoir decline, which drives demand for well intervention, artificial lift, compression, and gas handling equipment and services. Egypt's urgency to restore domestic supply volumes means procurement cycles for these brownfield services are compressing, and operators are awarding work faster than in a greenfield environment. Norwegian companies with competence in gas processing optimisation, subsurface well services, and brownfield project execution are operating in a market with genuine near-term pull.