Production of Egypts Zohr gas field hit 2 billion cubic feet per day (bcf/d), Egyptian oil ministry said in a statement Friday. "Nearly 7.7 billion US dollars have been invested in Zohr so far," the statement said. "The high production will contribute strongly to self-sufficiency of natural gas in the country," Egypts Petroleum Minister Tarek al-Molla said. On 16th of December 2017, the Ministry of Petroleum and Mineral Resources announced the start of the operation of gas pumping from the offshore wells in Zohr field to the new offshore station in El Gamil region in Port-said with an initial production rate about 350 million cubic feet of gas per day. That is after the success of the technical operation tests for the processing units and the gas transmission lines from the field’s well to the processing station. Discovered in 2015 by Italian "Eni", the field contains an estimated 30 trillion cubic feet of gas. Egypt has been seeking to speed up production from recently discovered fields, with an eye to halting imports by 2019 and achieving self-sufficiency.