EGPC signs Halliburton to design 50-well fracking program in GPC’s fields

The government is going back for the oil it left behind in the Western Desert. The Egyptian General Petroleum Corporation (EGPC) has contracted US oilfield services giant Halliburton to design a 50-well program over 18 months in the concessions of the state-owned General Petroleum Company (GPC), built on horizontal wells fractured in stages, the Oil Ministry said in a statement. The contract only covers studies and design for now, and drilling would follow if the numbers hold up.

SOUND SMART- Conventional drilling goes straight down and lets the reservoir’s own pressure lift the oil. Unconventional rock will not yield that way, so the well is turned sideways through the layer to expose far more of it, then cracked with water and sand pumped in under pressure; the cracks carry the oil to the well. The target is the Abu Roash F, the layer that generated the Western Desert’s fields. Most of its oil never reached a trap (a fold or fault where oil pools), so it’s still there, in rock tight enough to need the cracks.

Egypt hasn’t emptied its conventional book — eight Mediterranean blocks remain open until 14 December, but the onshore province where GPC operates is old. Not a dry basin, but a mature one where each barrel left costs more to lift.

IN CONTEXT- None of this is new to Egypt, which has been fracking wells since the early 1990s, with over 1k treatments in the Khalda Ridge fields in the Western Desert. Badr El Din Petroleum Company is fracturing Obaiyed Field this month, and Abu Roash F itself was cracked: TAG Oil re-entered a vertical well in Badr Oil Field in 2023 for 140 bbl / d, then put 12 stages into a 308-meter lateral in 2024. The equipment and the know-how have been in the country for decades, so the holdup is money, by our read.

And even if every well matched the pilot, the numbers would be modest. NES-8, GPC’s test well in the Western Desert, produced nearly 3 mmcf / d of gas from tight rock when it was fractured this year. Fifty wells matching that rate would add 150 mmcf / d, about five weeks’ worth of the roughly 120 mmcf / d a month that existing fields lose due to natural decline, by our math. And that’s gas, while the program is targeting oil. The ministry’s own preliminary estimate for fracking the Western Desert is 50k-100k bbl / d of crude, at most a fifth of what Egypt pumps today.

Why it matters: The alternative to a tight barrel is an imported one. Egypt no longer lifts enough to cover what it burns, so the shortfall comes in by tanker and is paid for in USD. A barrel cracked out of Abu Roash is hard currency kept at home, which is why the ministry is redrawing the contracts this work needs: performance and integrated-service deals, turnkey packages, and faster recovery of capex. Whether the studies due in 3Q FY 2026/27 turn into signed drilling is the test.