BP is advancing its $700 million, four-well offshore drilling programme in Egypt while simultaneously negotiating the sale of approximately $1 billion of its Egyptian assets to Mediterranean-focused Energean, in a move that will define which parts of its Egypt portfolio BP intends to keep and which it plans to exit.
Gordon Birrell, BP’s Executive Vice President for Production and Operations, reviewed the drilling programme with Egyptian Petroleum Minister Karim Badawi in a meeting on Thursday, 25 September 2026. The four-well campaign, which began in April 2026, is being executed by the Valaris DS-12 drillship under a $140 million contract with BP Exploration Delta covering approximately 350 days of operations.
The first well in the campaign, Fayoum North-4 in the West Nile Delta, has already been completed successfully. The well is currently producing approximately 80 million cubic feet of natural gas per day, delivered to the national grid two years ahead of the originally scheduled timeline by using existing processing facilities and the Giza-Fayoum pipeline, avoiding the need for new subsea infrastructure. Following the completion of Fayoum North-4, the Valaris DS-12 has moved to begin drilling the Gharab exploration well.
The four wells sit on both sides of the dividing line in BP’s Egypt portfolio restructuring. Fayoum North-4 is in the West Nile Delta acreage that Energean is lined up to acquire, meaning BP has handed its buyer a producing well on the way out. The next two wells, including Gharab, belong to Arcius Energy, the joint venture between BP and ADNOC that BP is retaining. This structure shows where BP intends to stay in Egypt once the asset sale closes, with its deeper exploration bets sitting in the JV associated with the Zohr giant gas field rather than in the West Nile Delta position.
The package Energean is understood to be in advanced negotiations to acquire covers BP’s West Nile Delta stakes, held jointly with Harbour Energy, and its 50% contractor interest in the Temsah concession. Reuters has reported the transaction value at approximately $1 billion. Energean, which already operates in the Eastern Mediterranean including its Karish gas field offshore Israel, has been actively building its Egyptian presence.
BP has committed $1.5 billion to gas exploration and development in Egypt in the 2026 to 2027 financial year, underscoring the scale of its commitment to the country’s upstream despite the partial portfolio exit. Egypt is running a broader national drilling programme targeting 101 oil and gas wells in 2026, part of a $5.7 billion government investment programme to drill 480 wells over five years, driven in part by the sharp increase in LNG import costs caused by the Iran war. Petroleum Minister Badawi confirmed that the cost of importing a single LNG cargo had doubled to approximately $80 million from $40 million before the conflict began, making domestic gas production a national economic priority.
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