Israel announced a major pipeline project from the gas fields off its shore involving four countries, terminating in northern Italy. The EastMed Pipeline could be one of the longest in history as well as one of the most technically difficult to pull off.
The deal was announced on World Israel News a few days ago and has been in negotiation for a couple of years now.
It’s being billed as a counter to both Arab and Russian power but that’s not really true. This will supposedly deliver 20 bcm annually to Cyprus, Greece and Italy and come at a significant cost because of the challenge of it. But the first train will be 10 bcm according to IGI Poseiden’s website, the company building the pipeline. 10 bcm is similar in size to the Southern Gas Corridor bringing gas in from Azerbaijan.
The agreement has been some two years in the works, with the four countries’ energy czars signing a memorandum of understanding regarding the pipeline in December 2017. It is considered a technically difficult project to complete not only because of the depth of the undersea route, but also because it will have to pass through a volcanic area in the ocean bottom between Cyprus and Greece.
No discussion of cost was in the announcement.
It was all about the politics. But, the politics of this is Kabuki theatre. The Russians don’t care about more pipelines to Italy, now that Turkstream is ongoing and Europe’s gas needs are accelerating.
This is a European Union project developed by IGI Poseidon under the auspice of the EU’s Connecting Europe Facility program. The EU is footing a lot of the bill for this.
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In late February 2018 high pressure over the North Atlantic and low pressure over the Mediterranean combined to generate a strong easterly airflow that brought Siberian temperatures to Western Europe, increasing heating demand to the point where there was a shortage of natural gas. The outcome was an increase in UK coal generation, partly because coal briefly became cheaper than gas as a source of electricity generation but mostly because the UK did not have enough gas in storage to fill both home heating and electricity generation needs. The UK, however, plans to shut down all its coal plants by 2025, and in this post I speculate as to what might have happened if they had all been shut down in 2018. The conclusion is that the UK would not have been able to cover peak load deficits during much of the cold period owing to inadequate gas supplies and installed gas capacity.
