But those bonds looked more like shackles after a weekend explosion in the north Sinai desert on a terminal serving the natural gas pipeline that links the uneasy Middle East neighbors.
The blast—blamed first on sabotage, then on a leak—is expected to disrupt flow of fuel into Israel only for a few days, and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said there would be no difficulty making up lost supply over that time. Still, with Israel now relying on Egypt for nearly half of its natural gas, and Cairo roiling, Israel’s parliament echoed with calls for a new energy independence: “Playing with gas is playing with fire,” Knesset member Carmel Shama-Hacohen warned on Sunday.
He and others want Israel to accelerate development of new natural gas discoveries off the Mediterranean coast that Israel’s infrastructure minister, Uzi Landau, has called “the most important energy news since the founding of the state.”
The giant offshore field, named after the biblical sea monster Leviathan, holds potentially 25 trillion cubic feet (tcf) (700 billion cubic meters) of natural gas, according to Noble Energy, a Houston, Texas-based exploration company that has a stake in the find. And while that may be enough natural gas to dramatically change the energy picture for a country that has always had to rely on fuel imports, Israel is no more likely than any other nation to be able to drill its way to energy security or peace.
Neighboring Lebanon, a country in a state of war with Israel since 1973, has made claims that the gas field lies within its maritime border. “It is not unimaginable that, in the next regional war, Israeli and Lebanese military elements could target the other’s natural gas drills,” concluded an analysis in Fast Company late last year. Other analysts predict a natural gas scramble in which Israel, Lebanon, Cyprus, and Syria all vie to be the first and largest gas player in the waters of the eastern Mediterranean.
But even if Leviathan’s wealth can be claimed peaceably, Israel’s new prospect wins it less than 1 percent of the 2,658 tcf (75 trillion cubic meters) of natural gas reserves in the Middle East. The reserves giants are Qatar, with a third of the Middle East’s natural gas stores, and Saudi Arabia, with about a tenth. Egypt is sitting on about double the reserves of Israel’s Leviathan. Israel will be competing against these big players, who have infrastructure already in place, as it tries to develop its new resources amid the ups and—more frequent of late—downs of the natural gas market.
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