Lebanon and Israel at crossroads for gas wealth prospects
MP Melhem Khalaf shows a map of Line 29 at the Lebanese Parliament building in downtown Beirut on June 6. He said Israel had started drilling for oil in some fields, including those adjacent to the Lebanese border. Photo by Wael Hamzeh/EPA-EFE
BEIRUT, Lebanon, June 24 (UPI) — Europe’s growing need for gas caused by Russia’s war on Ukraine is fueling growing interest in accelerating exploration and drilling of gas fields in the Mediterranean Sea – and pushing Lebanon and Israel to try to settle their maritime border dispute which has been going on for years.
The arrival of a floating gas exploration vessel, operated by the London company Energean, on the Karish field off the Mediterranean at the beginning of the month has reignited the dispute and increased tension between the two countries, still in state of war.
The Karish field, which contains 1.4 trillion cubic feet of proven and probable gas reserves, is located south of the southern boundary of the disputed area.
Rising tensions prompted the Lebanese government to call for a halt to Israel’s exploration efforts and to ask Amos Hochstein, an American who has mediated the indirect talks since 2020, to intervene.
In a recent turn of events, Lebanon presented a new “more realistic” offer to Hochstein, senior energy security adviser at the US State Department, during his visit to Beirut last week, a source said. official to UPI on condition of anonymity.
“It is clear that he [demands] more than line 23 and moved away from line 29, which he considered the negotiating line,” said the source, who has been involved in the negotiations for years.
Last year, the Lebanese delegation to the talks, made up of army generals and experts, presented a new map that would add 550 square miles (called Line 29) to the disputed 330 square mile area (called Line 23). ) of the Mediterranean Sea which each party claims is within their own exclusive economic zones. Negotiations stalled as Lebanon never officially claimed Line 29, which would give it part of the Karish field.
Indebted Lebanon, which hopes to join the club of oil producers, has wasted nearly a decade adopting different methods of demarcation and negotiation tactics. Israel, meanwhile, has developed offshore natural gas platforms and started exploration activities outside the disputed area, which is potentially rich in oil and gas and which both countries claim.
Lebanon, the source said, is waiting for Hochstein to come back with Israel’s response to its new proposal, which would give the Karish field to Israel and the Qana field to Lebanon.
He stressed that his country “will never accept, not now, not tomorrow, not next week, that Israel continues to drill in an area which they claim is outside the disputed area when we cannot do the same in our own area,” the Qana fielder said. .
A consortium of international companies, Total, ENI and Novatek, won the right to explore in 2018 in a bid to find natural gas, but “came under pressure not to start drilling” in the Qana field, according to The source.
He noted, however, that Hochstein has confirmed that Israel’s gas drilling rig, stationed in the Karish gas field, is located in Israeli territory and will not pump gas from the disputed area.
This could have, at least temporarily, defused tensions which have reached “a dangerous level”, with the heavily armed Lebanese Hezbollah backed by Iran and Israel trading threats over the Karish gas drilling, the source said.
Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah has warned that he will not allow Israel to extract gas from the field until negotiations with Lebanon are completed. Israeli army chief Aviv Kochavi has threatened to respond with “overwhelming force” in any future war with Hezbollah.
It remains to be seen whether Lebanon’s new compromise would open the door to the resumption of negotiations and the avoidance of confrontation.
But the move away from Line 29 has angered opposition politicians, energy experts and activists in Lebanon.
“Everything that the Lebanese side has offered to Hochstein is in no way related to a technical or legal basis. We are no longer talking about technical issues, the law of the sea or international laws. I don’t know what that it could be called,” Marc Ayoub, an energy researcher affiliated with the Issam Fares Institute at the American University of Beirut, told UPI.
Ayoub argued that by getting behind line 29, Lebanon “started from a weak position because line 23 has a lot of flaws”. It also raised questions about “a political compromise” and what the “political price” is.
He explained that if the Karish field has been in production since 2013 and the Qana field is not yet explored, “you are comparing a field that will produce in three months to a field that is still prospective”.
“We don’t know what Qana understands until we drill. There is speculation that it may hold strong oil and gas prospects. But we don’t know how many and whether or not it will succeed” , said Ayoub. “We need three to five years to find out if there is gas and oil and how much… and if they allow international companies to drill” in Lebanese waters.
Until then, Lebanon will miss great opportunities to join the many ongoing gas deals in the region, accentuated by the war in Ukraine and Europe’s gas supply needs.
In fact, it will not be in Israel’s interest to reject Lebanon’s offer if it wants to develop Karish and increase its gas production. Earlier this month, Israel, Egypt and the European Union signed a memorandum of understanding to export natural gas from Israel to EU countries, which are trying to reduce their dependence on supply screws from Russia.
“They [EU officials] are looking for the fields that are already explored and here we are talking about Israel and Egypt,” Ayoub said, arguing that pressure is exerted on Lebanon “for the good of Israel because no company will start working in Karish without security guarantees and a maritime demarcation line”.
With the collapse of the situation in Lebanon and the acute financial crisis, he said, the message is clear: “You will not produce gas if we do not say when, with whom and how… We can be weak but you can negotiate from a strong position, while preserving the minimum of national dignity.”
A Beirut-based Western diplomat argued that Israel needed a deal as much as the Lebanese, saying: “There is an open door.”
But would Hezbollah, which had previously said it would agree to any demarcation line adopted by the Lebanese government, accept such a compromise?
“Let’s say it gives Hezbollah an exit strategy to avoid having to resort to options that could start a war,” Riad Kahwaji, a Middle East security and defense analyst based in Dubai which runs the Near East and Gulf Institute for Military Analysis. .
Kahwaji said that Israel was focusing on Iran and sending clear messages to Hezbollah and Lebanon about the adverse consequences if Hezbollah decided to intervene to support Iran militarily in the event of an Israeli strike on its nuclear facilities or its arms depots in Syria.
“All these threats, although they are related in some way to the border dispute between Lebanon and Israel, it’s not the whole story, it’s part of the story,” he said. he declares.
It is clear, he added, that Hezbollah does not want to provoke a war because it “allowed the Lebanese government, which everyone knows has a strong influence on him and on the president, to make be flexible and make concessions to the Israelis to try to defuse.”
Regardless of how the border issue in Lebanon is resolved, Kahwaji said Hezbollah is trying to ‘delay the inevitable’ as much as possible because ‘it is still hopeful’ that there could be a nuclear deal reached. by Iran, the United States and the Europeans which will prevent any attack from Israel.