EASTERN MEDITERRANEAN GAS CONSIDERATIONS
Summer 2026
EXECUTIVE SUMMARY: The Middle East has entered a period of sustained strategic instability in which conventional military conflict, proxy warfare, and competition over maritime chokepoints increasingly overlap. Iran has suffered significant military and economic pressure but can still impose costs through regional partners and by disrupting Strait of Hormuz and Red Sea shipping routes. At the same time, doubts about the reliability and limits of American security guarantees are shaping Gulf states’ calculations. For Israel, the central strategic challenge is therefore shifting from achieving battlefield successes to translating military advantages into a more durable regional security architecture. This will require sustained cooperation with the United States and pragmatic Arab states while containing Iran and its remaining proxies and addressing the unresolved political and security questions surrounding Gaza.
In 2009 and 2010, immense deposits of natural gas were found off the coast of Israel in its exclusive economic zone (EEZ) within the Tamar and Leviathan fields, and shortly thereafter, the Aphrodite field in Cyprus. The Israeli discoveries alone represent over thirty trillion cubic feet of natural gas within Israel’s EEZ. In the years that have followed, the amount discovered has more than doubled, with the largest being the Zohr field in Egypt’s EEZ. Extractable gas discovered in the Eastern Mediterranean offers a new source of energy amidst current energy access uncertainty in the region, but its extraction and transportation are not straightforward. While these discoveries represent a transformative impact on the region’s energy resources, realizing their potential requires navigating infrastructure constraints, political disputes across competing maritime claims, and the commercial realities of export routing.
Much of the natural gas that is withdrawn north of Egypt goes through the Egyptian liquefaction facilities of Idku and Damietta. Strategically, this is a geographic bottleneck that subordinates regional operators and downstream customers to Egyptian assent. Natural gas comes from the Earth in gaseous form and when it is cooled to the threshold temperature where it converts to its liquid form—some six hundred times smaller in volume—it is referred to as liquefied natural gas or LNG; this is the form used for transport on sea vessels. The Zohr field is developed through companies operating under Egyptian law. Gas from fields outside of Egypt’s EEZ but processed at Egyptian facilities could face substantive upstream political pressures should disagreements between the nations occur in the future. Within Israel’s EEZ, natural gas is piped onshore, used domestically before sending much of the remainder to Egypt and Jordan. The practice of processing within one’s own territory is common in many nations and helps stave off severe effects should a shock occur. Egypt’s domestic gas consumption has grown faster than projected, further constraining its export capacity. Robustness and reliability in sustained flows represent a major concern for the nations who use any given energy input.
Israel’s Leviathan field was taken offline from February 28th through April 2nd; this pause in production led to increased energy prices for those who rely on the imports and underscores the effect of regional instability on energy production and prices for regional consumers, not just global markets. At the time of this writing, this shutdown represents the third time in as many years that Israeli supply has been severely curtailed by regional events, the other two having occurred in October of 2023 and June of 2025. During the closure, Jordan, for example, had to reduce gas utilization, tap its strategic petroleum stockpiles, and source alternate LNG from further afield to cover shortfalls for domestic consumption. Egypt also had to take similar measures during the supply shock and reduce domestic consumption. The importance of sustained regional security matters to producers, transporters and the end-users of not just LNG but many diverse products that rely on the energy source. This is a risk that is not unique to any one country.
Discussions of an EastMed pipeline linking gas from Israel’s Leviathan gas field to the Peloponnese, Greece, and onward to Puglia, Italy, for further downstream sales to Europe have been widely dismissed as unrealistic. While this would give continental Europe greater energy-sourcing optionality, the manufacturing and maintenance of such a pipeline would be exorbitantly priced and would be sensitive to significant maintenance complexities given the requisite depth—with sections exceeding 3,000 meters—and the 1,900+ kilometer length that would be necessitated for its route along the seabed.
An alternative to natural gas pipelines is known by the acronym FLNG or floating liquefied natural gas, where a sea-surface unit receives the gas from the seabed extraction infrastructure. This differs from the pipeline method, where the gas does not surface until it reaches land. In FLNG, the gas is liquefied and stored in insulated tanks onboard the floating facility. When a shuttle tanker arrives, it pulls alongside, loads the pre-cooled LNG, and departs. The facility warehouses continuously and does not wait for a ship. This differs from gas being piped in its non-compressed form, as is done from fields like Leviathan to Idku and Damietta, where it is cooled for transition to a liquefied state, where it is then liquefied natural gas. This volume reduction is enormously more convenient for transportation. In pipelines, natural gas is transported in its gaseous state because the flow rate, thermodynamic conditions, and buoyancy factors all support this mode of movement. In FLNG, the operating costs of the transport vessels necessitate transporting the gas in its cooled liquid form. FLNG consolidates the liquefaction process offshore, eliminating dependency on onshore infrastructure.
Building overland gas transit infrastructure would be easier and more cost-effective, but would expose stakeholders to countervailing influences over the governing bodies in the lands it transits across. While these same countervailing influences still exist under the water, they are less of a de facto state of being. It is less reliant on the more established overland considerations, given the greater ambiguity of competing frameworks such as Turkey’s non-signatory status of the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea, though over 160 other nations recognize it. Turkey’s Mavi Vatan, or ‘blue homeland,’ doctrine recognizes an alternate claim incompatible with UNCLOS, where some 460,000 square kilometers are considered within the legal purview of the nation. Building undersea infrastructure skirts the vetoing inclinations that overland pipeline infrastructure necessitates, but is open to legal ambiguity and shifting politics, perhaps too much for the private sector to greenlight the energy transportation infrastructure buildout necessary for extraction and transportation to end-users. The pattern where major powers exploit distraction windows has precedents in Turkey’s 1974 Cyprus intervention during the Watergate crisis and Russia’s 2008 incursion into Georgia during the Beijing Olympics.
The Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan (BTC) pipeline does not address connection to continental Europe through anything but potential additional overland Turkish routing, with its attendant political uncertainty and fragility of reliability. Turkey already extracts a per-barrel fee of $1.27 on Azerbaijani crude oil that transits the BTC pipeline through Georgia and Turkey to the port of Ceyhan. The November 2019 maritime delimitation agreement between Turkey and Libya drew a boundary that bisects the route of any pipeline bypassing Turkish territory. This represents a counterproposal by Turkey with some coherence but with not insignificant risks for stakeholders seeking export routes independent of transiting Turkish territory. The disruption in the Strait of Hormuz and conflict with Iran this year have brought renewed attention to considerations for energy transportation routes and alternatives. There is a need for regional transport divorced from this waterway and from routes more susceptible to conflict-based interruptions; this includes considerations for a cross-UAE route that bypasses the Strait, one that crosses Saudi Arabia, and several in the Levant that would bring more robustness to the region. Proposed land corridors are each subject to unique risks but would allow for greater latitude and mitigation for future supply shocks. Projects prompted by supply disruptions tended to move faster, as Goldman Sachs analysts have noted, but even with expeditious well-motivated timelines, there still exist large windows of unmitigated vulnerability and buildout complexity. Many of the corridors being considered reduce single point of failure risk, but do not address the elephant in the room—or between the continents: overland transportation to downstream European markets.
A coastal nation that wants to offer up extraction access to the private sector may choose to divide its EEZ into geographically delineated parcels or blocks. These blocks are then auctioned to the highest bidder, usually an international oil company—or multiple organizations working together, as is the case with the Aphrodite field off the coast of Cyprus, which is under a joint venture led by Chevron—who will then, under agreement with that nation, prospect and test for deposits, and then go forward into planning and development of extraction infrastructure, and ultimately finish with the commencement of the operational stage should everything go well. These blocks do not have to be auctioned at the same time. Like subsequent funding rounds in the venture capital space, it is often much more beneficial to have these auctions in subsequent rounds rather than simultaneously. However, the valuation risks for the remaining parcels exist symmetrically, though with differing magnitudes.
Less than a month before the time of this writing, the June 30th declaration that the Glaucus discovery is commercially viable marked a significant milestone. This is the latest Cypriot discovery to advance into the development planning stage. Disputed waters add complexity and uncertainty, as is the case with Greece and Turkey. While the legal justifications of disputes may ultimately prove unfounded, the confidence it can detract in the private sector is very real and has a material impact on dealmaking. During the COVID-19 pandemic, there was a notable case on the Greek island of Kastellorizo, whose position off the Turkish coast and UNCLOS zoning centerline considerations have made it a policy example, sharing similarities with discussions involving Turkish and Greek Cypriots. By law, EEZ projection off of islands is limited to only those that can “sustain human habitation or economic life of their own” per UNCLOS; other corollaries to this exist in other regions, such as the Nine-Dash Line projection and manmade island considerations. Whether or not the ultimate adjudication by supranational organizations and international consensus ultimately falls on the side of one nation over another, the uncertainty maintains the ability to spook investments and prevent developments from coming to fruition.
The natural gas found in the Eastern Mediterranean is substantial; the planning, engineering, extraction, and transportation all have their own pitfalls. While the buildout of physical export infrastructure is no easy task, the policy to do so may be even more precarious to line up and fragile to maintain without further, robust contingency planning for both initial and sustained operation. While the Zohr gas field holds an estimated thirty trillion cubic feet, Egypt has been consuming more of its withdrawals and exporting less than was expected, leading to less reliability for those dependent on downstream flows. A hypothetical alternative environment where more energy flows transited Turkey over land, as the BTC does, could lead to a more fragile energy architecture in the region, more vulnerable to a supply shock. As noted by BESA colleagues, countries building out IMEC-like infrastructure while refusing to call it IMEC due to the project’s perceived association with Israel are still pursuing diversifying corridors regardless of naming conventions, for bringing greater latitude and stability to transportation. Political alignments can be fleeting. Commercial realities do not always align and can shift unexpectedly. The delivery of both robust and cost-effective energy solutions for the region does not yield a simple or perennial answer.
Eitan Baruch is an undergraduate at the University of Pittsburgh and a Summer 2026 intern at the Begin-Sadat Center for Strategic Studies.