Natural gas mining in the Mediterranean Sea

Posted by alvina on December 31st, 2019

The Mediterranean Sea is now a hotbed of activity with the recent natural gas finds that have happened in the region. As such, the countries that share this wealth are looking for ways and means to be able to extract this natural gas from under the seabed of the Mediterranean, and either use it to meet their domestic energy needs or to export it to other countries and make good profits on it. To get this done, many countries have gone ahead with excavations and exploratory and commercial drilling in order to get to the gas and to start selling it. These countries have the right to use the gas and to get it to consumers to use - and when they utilise all of the gas under the Mediterranean Sea properly, it will give them a sense of energy security. With the natural gas finds in the Mediterranean, it is hoped that there will be energy security, peace, prosperity and cooperation amongst the nations that share this wealth.

The history of natural gas finds in the Mediterranean is rather short. The natural gas mining in the Mediterranean Sea began with the discovery of the first offshore find in the year 1969 in Egypt. And once this happened, the interest in natural gas resources was piqued and many countries were exploring the depths of the Mediterranean in order to find natural gas. In the year 1999 and 2000, there were some gas field discoveries made at Ashkelon in Israel, which is currently known as the Ashkelon gas field, which is a modest gas field discovery. But with this successful discovery, there was an accelerated effort to search for more gas fields, and with this came three of the most largest gas fields that have ever been found in the region. The Leviathan and Tamar gas fields were discovered in the Levant Basin in the years 2009 and 2010 in Israeli Seas as well as the Aphrodite gas field discovered near the coast of Cyprus. As recently as 2015, there was a huge gas field discovered near Egypt called the Zohr gas field, which is a humongous gas field discovery.

Even with these finds, this region has still not yet been explored to its fullest potential, with studies showing that almost 10 trillion cubic meters of usable natural gas still remain in the Mediterranean Sea, which is a gigantic volume of natural gas. With such information, many international conglomerates have set their sights on the region with the hopes of being able to extract the wealth of this region. In Israel, the natural gas mined from the Tamar field currently supplies around 60% of the electricity that is generated by them, and production of natural gas from the Tamar gas field started in 2013. The amount of reserves estimated in the Tamar gas field is around 282 billion cubic metres. The Leviathan gas field is estimated at around 621 billion cubic metres, and developmental activities are still going on to start the mining process from this gas field.