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CLEARING LANDMINES
EXPLOSIVE POTENTIAL
BY DAVID STANFORD
More than six decades ago, British forces fought German and Italian troops across northwest Egypt in a fierce battle for control of North Africa. As guns boomed across the Western Desert, few combatants would have anticipated the lasting legacy of their struggle: thousands of Egyptian casualties from landmines and unexploded ordnance left behind after World War II.
Nor would they have foreseen the obstacle that such explosive remnants of war would pose to the overall development of the northwest, a mineral-rich region considered crucial for the continued growth of the Egyptian economy. Yet, according to the government, the battle to exploit the region’s substantial petroleum reserves has been impeded by the risk of death and injury.
According to government figures, about 16.7 million landmines and items of unexploded ordnance (UXO) are scattered around the northern part of the Western Desert. Most lie buried along a 40-kilometer-wide coastal strip from Alexandria to the Libya border, although items have been found as far south as Siwa Oasis. Roughly 75 percent of the explosive items are UXO, consisting of unexploded bombs, mortars, artillery shells and bullets. The rest are landmines, both anti-tank and anti-personnel, laid by combatants on both sides as a defense against attack.
The cost in terms of human lives has been great, and the casualty toll mounts each year. Most of those killed and injured are Bedouin farmers working the land, and last month at least four more names were added to the list of casualties.
The cost to the Egyptian economy is harder to quantify. According to the government, the risk of death and injury has hampered not only mineral resource exploitation, but the development of agriculture, housing and tourism. The affected area covers an estimated 240,000 hectares, about 22 percent of the nation’s landmass, within which roughly 3 million feddans of land suitable for livestock grazing and cultivation remain largely unused. The region’s potential to attract tourists has only recently begun to be realized, while 650 billion cubic meters of mineral resources, including gold, phosphates and iron ore, remain mostly buried.
Government figures put the petroleum reserves of the northwest at about 4.8 billion barrels of oil and 13.4 trillion cubic feet of natural gas. According to the UK’s Deloitte Petroleum Services, exploitation of the northwest began in earnest some 10 years behind the other petroleum-rich regions of Egypt. The Gulf of Suez and Nile Delta were productive as far back as the 1970s, at which time the two main basins of the northwest, Abu Gharadig and the North Egypt basin, were barely functioning as petroleum producers. The Abu Gharadig basin began to pick up in the mid-1980s, while the North Egypt basin has only taken off in the last seven years.
One explanation for the relative tardiness of exploration in the northwest might be that there is a sufficient amount of oil and gas in the Gulf of Suez and Nile Delta; only when fields in those areas began to mature did attention drift westward. Still, considering the risks and complications of operating in minefields, few could blame oil companies for hanging back.
In the past decade, however, the picture has begun to change drastically. Encouraged by improved safety practices and well-honed working relations with Egyptian authorities, petroleum companies have begun to invest heavily in the area, often with impressive results.
One such company is Texas-based Apache Corporation, whose Egyptian subsidiary Apache Egypt has offices in Maadi. Apache Egypt runs two joint-venture companies in partnership with government-owned Egyptian General Petroleum Corporation (EGPC). The smaller of the two, Qarun Petroleum Company, is located in the Western Desert between Fayoum and Cairo. The larger, Khalda Petroleum Company, operates farther west, in areas near Al Alamein, Siwa and the Libya border. It also works as a non-operating partner with Shell in the Northeast Abu Gharadig concession.
In 2008, Apache Egypt had 236 producing wells across 23 concessions, with a total output of 179,332 barrels of oil per day and 785,504 million cubic feet of gas per day. Current output makes the company the top producer in the Western Desert and number three in Egypt.
Among its major successes since acquiring the operations of Khalda Petroleum Company in 2001 was the Qasr-1X find of 2003. As Apache CEO Steve Farris said at the time, the find represented “the most significant discovery in the Western Desert in the last decade and perhaps the most significant in Apache’s history.” Since that time, the company has made numerous discoveries and exceeded its own expectations in both oil and gas production. Just this summer, it announced the signing of three oil and gas deals with the Egyptian government totaling $30 million and involving 14 new wells.
The recent success of Apache and others in the area is due in large part to their close working relations with government bodies and the Egyptian Army, which is responsible for clearing selected areas of land of explosive remnants before exploration can begin. Petroleum companies, many of which are foreign-owned, also foot the bill for such mine-clearing activities. Other sectors, such as agriculture and construction, rely on government funding to clear areas before projects can get under way, which can cause significant delays.
The process of searching for oil and gas reserves begins with geological studies aimed at identifying promising areas. Once a location has been settled on, the company will carry out detailed 3-D seismic surveys of the area, using specialized off-road vehicles carrying seismic instruments. These vibrator trucks generate seismic waves at a series of points in the ground by shaking large metal pads. The vibrations travel through the ground, bouncing off subterranean features, and are then picked up by geophones on the surface. The resulting data is stored and later processed by super-computers to give a detailed picture of potential reserves.
The vibrator trucks follow a grid pattern, traveling in lanes that are typically 20 meters wide. Before a seismic survey can begin, specialist engineers from the Egyptian Army are called in to clear the way, detecting and removing explosive items as they go. For every square kilometer, the army clears the equivalent of about 32 hectares, leaving about 68 hectares of the section uncleared. Wherever suitable sites for drilling or extraction are discovered, further mine-clearance work is undertaken, as is the case with numerous pipelines that have been laid across the desert.
With seismic surveys in the Western Desert typically covering between 350 and 1,500 square kilometers, mine clearance is no small task, particularly given the harsh environment and distances between settlements. For instance, it recently took the army 50 days to clear an 850-square-kilometer area around Apache’s Salam gas plant.
According to Tom Voytovich, general manager at Apache Egypt, such working relationships add complexity to the operations.
“Our operations have to be planned, because you have to fit that mine-clearance in on the front end, particularly of seismic surveys, which are key to our business here,” says Voytovich. “They cover large areas, and so it takes a long time.”
The size of the area to be cleared is just one factor that needs to be considered. Certain areas are more densely packed with explosive remnants than others. Some years ago, Apache cleared an area in its West Med concession, close to the city of Al Alamein, which was the center of much of the fighting in 1942 and where most of the mines were laid. Preparing the land was something of a challenge, but the work paid off with three field discoveries. The area is now producing, and Apache is sinking a deep well there.
In more remote areas, army engineers often find no more than the odd unexploded bomb dropped by an airplane on its way home or perhaps a stray bullet. In such instances, the relative lack of materials to be removed drastically cuts the time and money spent on clearance.
The exact cost of mine clearance for seismic surveying is a closely guarded secret. Some sources put the figure at about $500 per hectare, paid to the Egyptian Army by petroleum companies as part of exploration costs. For large survey areas, costs can run into the millions of dollars and represent 30-40 percent of the overall cost of a seismic project.
However, as Tom Maher, exploration manager at Apache Egypt, explains, such costs are offset by the relative ease of surveying desert areas. “Shooting data in open desert, which most of the Western Desert is, is some of the cheapest seismic you can acquire anywhere in the world,” says Maher. “It’s a lot cheaper than offshore. It’s a lot cheaper than the Appalachian mountains in the US or any place that has significant terrain.”
Thanks in large part to aggressive exploration in the northwest, the last two or three years have seen a sizeable increase in Western Desert oil and gas production. In 2007-08, the Western Desert overtook the Gulf of Suez as the country’s most productive region, supplying 35 percent of Egypt’s oil and gas output, compared with 29 percent from the Gulf of Suez. In December 2009, Minister of Petroleum Sameh Fahmy announced that the Western Desert as a whole was responsible for 40 percent of national output.
With the overall decline in oil production in Egypt since 1993, from 940,000 barrels per day to a low of 697,000 in 2006, the contribution of the northwest seems to have come at a convenient time, helping to edge output up by 1.4 percent in 2007. In light of the dip in oil output, Egypt has increasingly put its faith in natural gas. The Western Desert is the second largest source of natural gas after the Mediterranean Sea, although its 12 percent contribution is still dwarfed by the Mediterranean’s 78 percent.
For oil company executives such as Voytovich, there is little doubt that the portion of the Western Desert in which they are operating is worth all the extra effort.
“The way I would characterize it is that the Western Desert is a very fertile hunting ground,” he says. “There’s enough energy, enough reserves out in the Western Desert to keep our attention for quite some time.”
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