Washington _ Agencies
A US-Israeli consortium, which is leading the development of Israel´s gas reserves at sea, announced an agreement to export natural gas to Egypt on Thursday.
Nobel Energie and her Israeli partner Delek, along with Egypt´s eastern Mediterranean gas company, bought 39 percent of the suspended pipeline linking the Israeli city of Ashkelon to North Sinai.
Consortium paid 518 million dollars to invest in the pipeline owned by the Eastern Mediterranean Gas company.
The line, the largest part of which is under the sea, will be used to transport natural gas from the Tamar and Levatan fields to Egypt from the beginning of 2019 to a ten-year agreement signed in February February worth $15 billion, according to Dielik.
It will be the first time that Egypt, which became the first country to sign a peace agreement with Israel, is to import gas from its neighbour.
Israel was buying gas from Egypt but parts of the pipeline passing over the land were targeted in extremist attacks in the Sinai in 2011 and 2012.
Yossi Abou, CEO of Delek, said the purchase of the pipeline represents "the most important station for the Israeli gas market since the discovery of the fields.
"The Levatan field has become the main pillar of energy in the Mediterranean basin with customers in Israel, Egypt and Jordan," he said.
In September September 2016, Jordan entered into a deal to buy 300 million cubic feet of Israeli gas a day for 15 years in an agreement worth about $10 billion.
Israel has limited natural resources, but in recent years it has discovered large gas fields off its coast and is constructing the necessary infrastructure to extract it.
The Tamar field, which began production in 2013, contains about 238 billion cubic meters of gas.
The Levatan field, discovered in 2010 and expected to begin production in 2019, is estimated to contain 535 billion cubic meters of natural gas, as well as 34, 1 million barrels of condensate gas.
Israel hopes that the gas reserves would allow it to export to Europe.
Last week, Cyprus, which is aligned with the reserve for underwater gas with Israel´s reserves, signed an agreement paving the way for the construction of an undersea pipeline to transport gas to Egypt´s liquefied natural gas (LNG) conversion facilities to allow the re-export of production to Europe.
