Egypt's Zohr gas field starts production

CAIRO: Egypt's Zohr natural gas field, the largest in the Mediterranean, began production on Saturday with an initial 350 million cubic feet a day, the oil ministry said in a statement.

The field operated by the Italian ENI company is estimated to hold 850 billion cubic metres of gas.

"With the completion of the initial phase for this project planned for June 2018 production will gradually reach more than a billion cubic feet a day," oil minister Tarek al-Molla said in the ministry statement.

Production would eventual increase to 2.7 billion cubic feet a day, he said.

ENI had discovered the field in 2015 in a windfall for the North African country which has had to import fuel to feed its growing demands.