STEP BY STEP: CAIRO’S MARITIME AMBITIONS AND THE BUILD-UP OF THE EGYPTIAN NAVY Lukács Krajcsír ECONOMIC AND GEOPOLITICAL FACTORS It has been well known for years that the Levant Basin—the waters of Cyprus, Egypt, Greece, Israel, Lebanon, Syria, and Turkey—contains circa 122.4 trillion cubic feet of recoverable gas.1 Cairo has worked with other regional players to create a new multilateral framework and to promote a new regional pattern for economic cooperation, informal dialogue, and political interdependence to overcome the existing fault lines in the wider Mediterranean facing quite a few power struggles.2 In recent years, several cooperation agreements among Cyprus, Egypt, Greece, and Israel, e.g., on the delimitation of their exclusive economic zones, have been signed. One of the biggest achievements was the establishment of the international body of the Eastern Mediterranean Gas Forum (EMFG) in January 2020, headquartered in Cairo. The members of the so-called “OPEC of Mediterranean gas” are Cyprus, Egypt, Greece, Israel, Italy, Jordan, and the Palestinian Authority, while the EU, the US, and the United Arab Emirates are its permanent observers and France has also applied for membership. As the Egyptian diplomacy described, the EMFG
is an international organisation that respects its member states’ rights to resource extraction, declares common war against “illegal drillings and mining” by other countries (e.g., Turkey), and strengthens energy cooperation (for instance, by building gas pipelines) among its members.3 Cairo’s strong commitment to protecting—by legal and military means alike—its undersea resources stems from the fact that Egypt also has a lot of gas within its maritime borders. Foreign energy companies, such as British Petrol (BP), Deutsche Erdoel AG (DEA AG), Ente Nazionali Idrocarburi (ENI), Russian Rosneft, and Emirati Mubadala, have discovered six large fields so far. With the windfall gas wealth of Zohr and the country’s latest discoveries (e.g., the Nour gas field), 58% of Egypt’s gas production comes from deep-water reservoirs in the Eastern Mediterranean.4 President Abdel-Fattah al-Sisi claimed in 2019 that Egypt has achieved natural gas self-sufficiency thanks to its new findings. Moreover, the Arab country could become a regional hub for energy trade and the main distributor of liquefied natural gas.5
Table 1: Egypt’s biggest offshore natural gas discoveries in the Eastern Mediterranean as of April 2020 Field name
Date
Estimation of reserves (billion cubic metres)
Atoll
2015
15
BP (100)
Nooros
2015
20
ENI (75), BP (25)
West Nile Delta
2015
50
BP (83), DE AG (17)
Zohr
2015
850
ENI (50), Rosneft (30), BP (10), Mubadala (10)
West Baltim
2016
10
ENI (50), BP (50)
Nour
2019
20
ENI (40), BP (25), Mubadala (20), others (15)
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COUNTRY STUDIES
Main exploiters and their shares (%)
