Foreign investment in Egypt’s oil and gas sector increased to $10bn in the 2017-18 financial year, according to Petroleum Minister Tarek el-Molla.

Speaking in an interview with state-run Al-Ahram newspaper El-Molla said he expected the same volume of investments in the current fiscal year.

In the 2016-17 period foreign investment was $8.1bn. Egypt’s fiscal year runs from July to June.

The value of foreign investment in Egypt has risen after a series of major gas discoveries in the country. The country has seen a boom in energy project activity on the back of the enormous Zohr gas discovery by Italy’s Eni in 2015. Since that Zohr discovery, the government has announced plans to take advantage of existing energy infrastructure and reinvent itself as a regional energy hub.

The North African state has an extensive pipeline network and two idle gas liquefaction plants that will be able to export gas imported via pipeline as liquefied natural gas (LNG).

Egypt hopes to once again become a net gas exporter by 2019.

At the beginning of March, the total value of active energy projects in the country went up by 60 per cent compared to three years ago. In January 2015, the total value of oil, gas and petrochemical projects stood at just $42bn, according to MEED Projects data. But now it stands at more than $67bn.