Chinese firm drills deepwater wells for Egyptian village in Sahara Desert

In a remote village in the Siwa Oasis of Egypt's Western Desert, part of the Sahara Desert, a Chinese drilling company, commissioned by the Egyptian authorities, is digging deepwater wells for the villagers in efforts to bring them sustainable and sufficient access to drinking water.

"I offered a sheep to the Chinese drilling team on behalf of the whole village as a thank-you gift for drilling water wells for us," Hasan Osman, a 30-year-old villager, told Xinhua, looking at the huge drilling platform of the Chinese firm Zhongman Petroleum and Natural Gas Group (ZPEC).

The village where Osman lives is called Malol, located in the Siwa Oasis about 560 km west of the capital Cairo. Close to the Egyptian border with Libya, Siwa is the most remote and inaccessible desert oasis in Egypt.

"The water we have been drinking is salty and insufficient for drinking, let alone for growing crops," Osman says.

With the arrival of the ZPEC drilling team comes the potential access to potable water.

Like a long-awaited rain in the desert, the drilling site has become a magnet for villagers who talk about the promising project and make friends with the workers.

"We're very happy that the Chinese company is digging a well for us! What a pleasure!" Osman says with an expectant grin.

Li Wei, general manager of the ZPEC branch in Egypt, told Xinhua that the village heavily relies on underground water, but the existing wells are mostly shallow with a depth of 300 to 400 meters, offering water of high salinity well below ideal drinking water par.

In February, the Egyptian authorities decided to stop drilling shallow wells in Siwa and contracted ZPEC to drill two deepwater wells with a depth of about 1,200 meters to tap quality water sources for the local people.

This is not the first time for ZPEC to provide deep drilling services in Egypt.

Since 2016, the Chinese company has been providing drilling services in Sinai Peninsula, where its highly efficient work quickly won recognition from the Egyptian government and resulted in more projects by contract in the North African country.

The project in Siwa has never been easy. The team managed to transport a 550-horsepower drilling rig from Cairo all the way to Siwa for the project, before being put to the test of difficulties in technical work and management.

"Due to the remote location of the project and some geological problems, the company's technical department has assigned specialized experts to study and implement leak prevention and plugging measures at the drilling site," Li says.

Pointing to a well being drilled at hand, Fahmy Abdel-Hamid, a project manager who has been working for ZPEC for nearly five years, says the well has been drilled to a depth of over 400 meters so far, with 28 workers manning it in two shifts round the clock.

Abdel-Hamid also praised the Chinese professional and technical expertise in the drilling field, noting he has gained a lot of experience from his work at ZPEC.

"We're not only bringing a couple of deepwater wells to the village but also hoping for the local people to live a better life," Li says.