Israeli gas flows back to Egypt, overcoming the energy crisis
Bloomberg cited informed sources as saying the gas comes from the offshore Leviathan field, following the end of a production disruption at another field, Karish, whose supply is currently being used to secure domestic demand in Israel.
Before the war began, Egypt imported approximately 800 million cubic feet of natural gas from Israel. Following the Hamas attacks in southern Israel and the Israeli response, however, imports dried up.
Israeli authorities ordered Chevron to halt production at the Tamar field due to its proximity to the fighting and ordered the mining company to divert production at the Leviathan field to Jordan.
Chevron became operator of the Tamar and Leviathan gas fields when it acquired the original operator, Noble Energy. Tamar has reserves estimated at about 11 trillion cubic feet of gas and Leviathan has double that, according to estimates cited by Energy Intelligence.
Israeli exports from these fields to Egypt ensured the country's growing energy demand and left some for exports to Europe, from the Egyptian LNG plant. With the outage and diversion, however, Egypt found itself in a crisis situation, with daily blackouts at a time of increased demand.
Now that Israeli gas has returned to Egypt, the blackouts may end, but exports to Europe may not resume immediately. The first thing for Egypt to do would be to secure domestic supplies. To ensure supply to Europe there will need to be a decline in gas consumption for electricity generation in Egypt, which could happen during the winter.
However, this should not be an immediate problem for Europe. Reuters recently reported that around 30 LNG tankers are on their way to the continent and the UK, expected to arrive by the end of the month. Egypt, however, will resume LNG exports when domestic demand has reduced, according to Eni, which has extensive operations in the North African country.
At the same time, this situation clearly explains why Egypt has an overall soft attitude towards Israel, especially when compared with that of other Muslim-majority states.
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The article Israeli gas flows back to Egypt, overcoming the energy crisis comes from Economic Scenarios .
This is a machine translation of a post published on Scenari Economici at the URL https://scenarieconomici.it/il-gas-israeliano-torna-a-fluire-verso-legitto-facendo-superare-la-crisi-energetica/ on Fri, 03 Nov 2023 14:46:33 +0000.