Pharos benefits from Egypt’s flexibility

The firm’s onshore Western Desert asset allows for rapid optimisation based on the macroeconomic environment

The Covid-driven oil price crash in 2020 could hardly have come at a worse time for the Egyptian business of London-listed Pharos Energy. “We had really only just started to see the benefits flowing through from the drilling that we started when we first acquired [the El-Fayum asset] in the middle of 2019—the production levels were double where they stood when we bought it,” CEO Jann Brown tells ­Petroleum Economist. “If you think back to March 2020, nobody knew how low it could go, how long would it last,” she continues of that period of deep uncertainty for the industry. “Capitalising on flexibility—the ability to ramp up or down production and activity depending on price and access to liq