At the heart of the East Med: partnerships and infrastructure for a regional energy hub
Channa Kurukulasuriya, Egypt Country Manager at Chevron, discusses Egypt’s growing importance as a pivot point for the company’s Eastern Mediterranean strategy and its wider energy potential
What are your thoughts on Egypt’s growing role as a regional energy hub?
When you look at the structural formation of Egypt, there is a population of 120 million people growing energy demand. When you look at Egypt’s production, it produces nearly 1.2 million barrels of oil equivalent. It’s a large market with a large amount of production — an energy-hungry market. But when you look at Egypt, it also has a lot of infrastructure that can be leveraged. Not only domestic consumption, but also the LNG infrastructure that is in place allows Egypt to export excess production outside of its shores, making it primed to be an energy hub in the region.
Can you highlight the recent milestones and achievements of Chevron’s business in Egypt and your future aspirations?
Chevron has a long history in Egypt of nearly 90 years. We participate in the downstream segment, in the midstream segment, and in the upstream segment. In the downstream segment, we have a lubricants operation here with the blend plant. We import gas from the Eastern Mediterranean to the growing Egyptian market. We are also looking at domestic exploration with three exploration blocks in Egypt: one for discovery, and we are looking to acquire more. Of course, we have aspirations to import gas into Egypt through our Cyprus operations as well. Egypt is the epicentre of a lot of our activities in the region.
This year’s theme for EGYPES 2026 is ‘Transforming energy through collaboration, action and realism’. How does that resonate with Chevron?
For Chevron, collaboration and partnership is foundational to our value system. It’s not just a slogan, it’s something that we truly believe in. Partnering with the host government in Egypt has been really productive. We need to always strive towards a win-win partnership and we need to understand what the investors need. We need to understand what the host governments need and we need to create an environment that is beneficial to both the investor and the host government. What we see in Egypt is strong partnerships driving towards performance and also trying to elevate people in the country.
