Bloomberg: Israel’s Undersea Gas Bonanza May Spur Mideastern Strife
Egypt’s decision last month to stop selling natural gas to Israel could be a harbinger of increasingly confrontational Egyptian-Israeli relations, an indication of a worsening Egyptian economy, or both.
In any case, the end of the arrangement, which provided 40 percent of Israel’s supply, suggests the need for more Israeli creative thinking and assertive diplomacy -- not with Egypt but, counterintuitively, with Turkey and Lebanon.
The Egyptian move would have raised greater concerns just a few years ago than it does today among Israelis, who import 70 percent of natural gas and all of their oil. Then, Israel saw no alternative to a near-complete dependence on other countries to meet its energy needs.
Discoveries of large underwater gas fields in the eastern Mediterranean, however, have changed Israel’s energy prospects almost overnight. In 2009, a consortium of U.S. and Israeli companies discovered the Tamar field about 50 miles off the Israeli coast, with an estimated 8.3 trillion cubic feet of gas. A year later, a similar consortium discovered Leviathan, a huge field nearby estimated to hold 16 trillion cubic feet of natural gas. MORE