Second only to developments in the Iran-Israel conflict, reports on government efforts to secure gas supplies and prevent load shedding now dominate both airtime and print space in the Egyptian media.
The government is moving on parallel paths, starting with signing gas import agreements, accelerating the connection of new regasification units to the national grid, depending more on fuel oil to operate power plants, and offering new areas for exploration.
The Ministry of Petroleum and Mineral Resources awarded seven new exploration and production blocks to investors earlier this week. A statement by the ministry noted that out of these blocks, at least 17 new oil and gas wells should show yields soon.
Meanwhile, the new Floating Storage and Regasification Units (FSRU), huge vessels that dock in ports receiving liquified natural gas (LNG) shipments and convert them into the gaseous state that can be easily pumped into pipelines connected to the national grid, were largely in the limelight.
Both the prime minister and the minister of petroleum visited the Ain Sokhna Port to observe the readiness of the infrastructure for the connection of the second and third FSRU.
Currently, Egypt has one operational FSRU, Hoegh Galleon, at the Red Sea port of Ain Sokhna, with two more expected to start working in July and a fourth to reach the country in August.
“Bringing the second and third regasification vessels into operation by the first week of July will secure our needs if gas supplies from the networks of neighbouring countries are cut off,” said Prime Minister Mustafa Madbouli at the cabinet’s weekly press conference.
The two new units are Energos Eskimo, obtained from Jordan earlier this month, and the German-built Energos Power.
Egypt had contracted for eight LNG shipments to be offloaded, regasified, and pumped into the national grid in June, provided that a second regasification unit was up and working.
However, there was a delay in connecting the new FSRU unit, and because the shipments had already maxed out the capacity of the Hoegh Galleon, the only currently working FSRU, tankers are queuing in Ain Sokhna waiting to offload their cargoes, according to the Middle East Economic Survey (MEES).
The problem of delays would have been circumvented had the Energos Eskimo been in its original place in Aqaba.
In December 2024, the American company that owns the Energos Eskimo agreed with the Egyptian authorities that the unit would be transferred to Egyptian waters, on the condition that Egypt provided Jordan with the needed gas through the Arab Pipeline.
Under the deal, Jordan, which has a gas supply gap and is also dependent on Israeli gas exports, had the right to share the use of the Energos Eskimo until 2026, with around 350 million cubic feet of gas per day exported to Jordan and representing a significant share of the vessel’s regasification capacity.
The MEES explained that Egypt last year imported four gas cargoes between April and June through the Energos Eskimo while it was at Aqaba, but “it is now marooned and waiting to be installed to Egypt’s grid.”
The ship was transferred from Aqaba to Ain Sokhna at the start of this month.
Due to disruptions in Israeli gas supplies, Egypt is supplying Jordan with only 100 million cubic feet of natural gas per day to help it operate its power plants. It is doubling its electricity exports to Jordan. The two countries have a long-standing electricity exchange agreement, which was renewed for 2025.
Another track that the government has been following is increasing its purchases of fuel oil that can be used instead of gas in operating the facilities of some industries.
According to Reuters, Egypt is seeking approximately 900,000 tons of fuel oil for supply in August through its latest supply tender. The country consumes approximately 40,000 tons of fuel oil per day for power generation, according to the news agency.
The current situation is a far cry from how things were between 2019 and 2022, when Egypt was a net gas exporter thanks to the production of the giant gas field Zohr.
However, a slowdown in production in the Field due to technical issues, as well as foreign explorers’ reluctance to increase production with their dues accumulating, cast its shadow on the country’s production, and it started to import gas from Israel.
Egypt’s gas production came below the four billion cubic feet per day threshold in recent months, its lowest in almost a decade. Gas represents 80 per cent of the fuel mix used to generate power in Egypt.
Imports from Israel were stable until the recent escalation of the conflict between Israel and Iran. Egypt’s gas imports from Israel stopped on 13 June, with the Leviathan and Karish fields suspending production as soon as the first Iranian blows struck Israeli targets.
Egypt used to receive around one billion cubic feet per day of gas from Israel, accounting for up to 60 per cent of its total gas imports and around a fifth of its total consumption, according to the Joint Organisation for Data Initiative (JODI), an international initiative to make oil and gas data available.
While Israel resumed pumping gas, in small quantities, to both Jordan and Egypt at the beginning of the week, it is rumoured to have stopped a couple of days later, with Iran’s attacks hitting energy facilities.
Accordingly, the government told local petrochemical plants that the resumption of gas supplies would be delayed until the end of June, and the return to pre-war volumes would take place by mid-July, according to a statement by an anonymous official source to Al-Arabiya Business.
* A version of this article appears in print in the 26 June, 2025 edition of Al-Ahram Weekly
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