(CN) — A new, potentially explosive geopolitical dimension is being added to the puzzle that is the Middle East: A push by Israel, Europe, Egypt, Turkey and even the United States to drill for fossil fuels in the waters of the eastern Mediterranean Sea.
In recent years, large reservoirs of natural gas have been discovered under the seafloor of the Mediterranean and now nations and energy companies are jostling to exploit these gas deposits despite the dangerous environmental and geopolitical consequences.
A push to drill off the coasts of Cyprus and Israel has accelerated in recent months after major deals between European Union nations, the U.S. and Israel were reached and set in motion drilling operations, pipeline projects and even military support for the gas exploitation.
“It's like a gold mine or a gold rush what's going on here,” Ya'ara Peretz, a campaigner with Green Course, an Israeli environmental group opposed to the gas developments, said in a telephone interview with Courthouse News from Tel Aviv.
This gold rush, though, is taking place in one of the world's most disputed seas with a long history of skirmishes over islands, sea battles, piracy and war.
“If you think of it, the countries in the neighborhood have many differences,” said Constantinos Hadjistassou, an oil and gas expert at the engineering department of the University of Nicosia in Cyprus. “Think of Israel, Lebanon, Turkey and Cyprus; think of Turkey and Greece; Turkey and Egypt. There is a lot of friction between the countries.”
Gas under the seafloor of the eastern Mediterranean was first discovered in the 1970s by Egypt, Hadjistassou said. But they were small discoveries close to Egypt's shores. Then Israel found offshore gas reservoirs in the 1990s and early 2000s, prompting prospectors to search for more. By 2009, large pockets of gas were found in an Israeli offshore gas field named Tamar. More major discoveries followed: the Aphrodite field near Cyprus; the Leviathan in Israeli waters; and in 2015, a supergiant field in Egyptian waters called Zohr.
In all, researchers say this eastern Mediterranean area, known as the Levantine basin, has proven reserves of more than 60 trillion cubic feet of gas. However, the U.S. Geological Survey has estimated that as much as 122 trillion cubic feet of gas and 1.7 billion barrels of oil lie in the basin. That amount of gas is equivalent to about 76 years of gas consumption in the European Union.
That is a lot of gas, but activity in the eastern Mediterranean for now is quite modest compared to the world's busiest offshore fields, such as those in the Gulf of Mexico, the North Sea, the Persian Gulf and offshore Brazil where hundreds of drilling rigs are busy sucking up oil and gas from thousands of wells. In the eastern Mediterranean, only about 50 wells have been dug so far in its ultradeep waters, Hadjistassou said. The drilling is done mostly by semi-submersible rigs with gas now flowing by pipelines to Egypt and Israel.
In this gas frenzy, Turkey has become the disruptive player. It has good reasons to want to act as a spoiler: It fears being cut out of a lucrative new gas horizon at its front door.
Despite its 5,000 miles of Mediterranean coast, Turkey's maritime claims are hemmed in by numerous Greek islands that abut right up to Turkey; also, its maritime boundaries are restricted by the large island of Cyprus 45 miles off the Turkish coast.
To counter being bottled in and potentially losing roughly half of its maritime territory, last November Turkey signed an agreement with the United Nations-backed government in war-torn Libya staking out maritime rights over a large swath of sea between the two countries. But their claims include the offshore waters of Crete and those of numerous Greek islands lying close to Turkey's shores. The deal also serves Turkey's military purposes because it is backing the Islamist-dominated government in Tripoli in that country's civil war.