Egypt expects to import gas to Lebanon by early 2022: Minister

Shafaq News/ Egypt is expecting to begin exporting 60-65 million cubic feet of gas per day to Lebanon by early next year, Egyptian Petroleum Minister Tarek El Molla said on Tuesday.

Egypt will supply the gas, in line with the quantity that Lebanon had requested, “as soon as we can ... we might expect it end of the year, early next year,” Molla said on the sidelines of an oil and gas conference in Abu Dhabi.

“We are just (doing) due diligence, checking the pipelines,” he said.

Under a US-backed plan to help ease Lebanon’s power crisis, Egypt will supply natural gas to Lebanon via a pipeline passing through Jordan and Syria.

The participants in the ministerial meeting of the Arab Gas Pipeline countries agreed, last September, to deliver Egyptian natural gas to Lebanon via Jordan and Syria, and to present an action plan and a timetable for its implementation.

The Arab Gas Pipeline project was implemented in three phases, the first phase from Al-Arish to Aqaba, with a length of 265 km, a diameter of 36 inches, and a capacity of 10 billion cubic meters per year. The supply of natural gas from Egypt to Jordan under this phase began in July 2003.

As for the second phase, it extended from Aqaba to the Rehab region in northern Jordan, with a length of 393 km. The supply of gas to power plants in the north of the Kingdom began in February 2006, while the second phase of the Arab Gas Line was completed from Rehab to the Jordanian-Syrian border, with a length of 30 km and a diameter of 36. inches in March of 2008.

The implementation of the southern part of the third phase of the Arab Gas Pipeline inside Syrian territory, extending from the Jordanian-Syrian border to the city of Homs, with a length of 320 km and a diameter of 36 inches, was completed and commissioned in July 2008, and the export of Egyptian natural gas to Lebanon via Jordan began in the month December 2009, until it was discontinued in 2011.