An official with Badr El Din Petroleum (BAPETCo) stated to Egypt Oil&Gas that the company has rented the services of two new 1,500-horespower rigs. This brings the total number of rigs employed by BAPETCo to four, in an attempt to execute the company’s extensive drilling strategy.

The rigs, originally owned by the Egyptian Drilling Company, cost BAPETCo $20,000 daily. The EDC-51 rig was deployed in the beginning of December 2016. It will be used to drill J-14/4 well. EDC-42 rig will also be used to drill SITRA-44 and it will start running in January 2017. The remaining rigs, EDC-52 and EDC-72, are used in the Yas-1 exploratory well and SITRA8-42 development well, respectively.

Meanwhile, BAPETCo’s CEO, Emad Hamdy, stated that the company is currently producing 140,000b/d of oil equivalent, which is higher than that planned for fiscal year 2016/2017. The projected output was set at 128,000b/d of oil equivalent, at $342m in investments.

Hamdy further stated that the 2016/2017 fiscal plan included drilling nine exploratory wells, 16 development wells and 8 water injection wells. Of the planned drilling, the company has succeeded in drilling four exploratory wells, nine development wells and two water injection wells. This comes as BAPETCo conducted 75 different operations on the wells including layers’ perforation and hydraulic cracking.