Are Israeli natural gas deliveries ramping back up? Israel’s natural gas imports to Egypt have partially picked up after a sudden slump in supply following the outbreak of the war on Gaza, reports Reuters, citing an official from the Oil Ministry. Israel halted production at Chevron’s second-largest field Tamar for security reasons, which reduced our gas imports by c. 20%, and other fields had most of their supplies diverted to prioritize Israel’s domestic needs.

How much are we talking? Israeli gas imports picked up last week to 250 mn cubic feet per day — a little more than a quarter of the 800 mn cubic feet per day recorded before the war, according to Bloomberg, citing a source with direct knowledge of the matter. “The giant Leviathan field is exporting the fuel after another Israeli field, Karish, returned from an outage, allowing domestic demand to be met,” the business information service reports. Asharq Business, meanwhile, says we’re back up to 350 mn cubic feet per day from Israel.

Did exports ever completely stop? The Madbouly cabinet said last week that imports of gas had fallen to zero, but an official at the Leviathan gas field told Reuters that deliveries to Egypt had never fully stopped. Asharq Business similarly reported that natural gas imports from Israel never dipped below 150 mn cubic feet per day, citing an unnamed Egyptian government official. An Oil Ministry official declined to comment to Enterprise yesterday when asked about whether gas imports had fallen to zero.

How low had imports from Israel fallen? To maybe 100 mn cubic feet per day, according to one industry insider we spoke with last Thursday, “but with significant fluctuations.” Production from Tamar stopped entirely, while gas from Leviathan was redirected through Jordan and the Arab Gas Pipeline to satisfy Israeli and Jordanian clients first.

There are rumors that we are importing a shipment of LNG, Bloomberg (citing shipping data) writing on Friday that we were due to receive in Ain Sokhna our first LNG consignment since July.

CLARIFICATION- In our energy roundup on Thursday, we were unclear in our characterization of Eni’s Orion X1 project. Drilling on the project started approximately two weeks ago, a few weeks after Eni had initially targeted. The later start to the drilling is not a significant delay in a project with a development time of three years (give or take). Eni hopes to find that the offshore field has c. 10 tn cubic feet of natural gas.

Tags: