Tightening the deficit on gas - Economy - Al-Ahram Weekly
The streak of bad news on Egypt's natural-gas production has been broken, following three years of a decline in production, under-met demand, and increased imports, with officials now speaking of the possibility of Egypt regaining its status as a net gas exporter by 2027.
Developments over the past six weeks have been particularly promising, with Egypt agreeing last week with Cyprus to receive gas from its largest fields, the Cronos, off Cyprus's southwest coast, and the Aphrodite, to the southeast.
The gas will be transported by pipeline to Egyptian waters and then transferred to Egyptian liquefaction facilities at Idku and Damietta before being re-exported as liquified natural gas (LNG) to Europe.
The deal is advantageous to Egypt as it will have the Right Of First Refusal (ROFR), allowing it to decide whether to purchase gas liquefied in local plants or sell it on, according to Osama Kamal, a former Oil Minister.
'Egypt can use this gas to cover part of the deficit in local supply. More importantly, the gas transferred through the pipelines is less expensive than importing LNG and then changing it back to the gaseous state to pump it into the local network. Moreover, Egypt will be getting a fee for liquefying and then exporting the gas to Europe,' Kamal noted.
However, this will not happen immediately, as while discoveries have been announced by Cyprus since 2013 they have lacked the needed infrastructure to transfer and sell it, he added.
'There was a breakthrough when Cyprus agreed with Chevron to undertake the development process and link its fields with our network very close to the Zohr Field, from where we would transfer it to liquefaction units in Damietta and Idku,' he said.
The problem has been that the costly process of developing these fields might take six months or even 18 months, depending on development plans, which are still unclear, Kamal said.
The government has plans to cover domestic needs for gas until then.
The Cyprus deal came a few weeks after the resumption of drilling in the Zohr Field. In October, Petroleum Minister Karim Badawi said the government planned to increase production at the field by 220 million cubic feet per day (cf/d) through drilling new wells.
Starting operations in 2017, the Zohr Field was the main reason Egypt became a net exporter of gas, with production peaking at 2.8 billion cf/d in the third quarter of 2021. However, technical problems related to water filtration as well as a stop in drilling activities due to delays in paying arrears to Eni, the field's developer, led to a decline in production to below two billion cf/d in the first half of 2024.
A report by the Middle East Economic Survey (MEES) pointed out that Egypt's gas production dropped to an eight-year low in 2024 to reach 4.87 billion cf/d. The output of the offshore Mediterranean fields, where the Zohr and other smaller fields are located, dipped by 18 per cent through the year to reach 3.54 billion cf/d, its lowest in six years.
In addition to plans to increase imports, the government is now giving foreign explorers incentives to encourage them to increase production. This includes paying arrears, with the government paying $1 billion of arrears in January after setting a schedule to repay all the $6.5 billion accumulated dues up until June 2025.
It also includes increasing production-sharing ratios with foreign companies in exchange for new investments as well as giving them the green light to export some of their production.
Exploration contracts in Egypt give foreign partners 25 to 30 per cent of a field's production. The government also uses the right to buy gas from them rather than let them export it. The delay in paying its dues has accumulated, with the arrears pushing some foreign companies to slow down the exploration processes, leading to last year's energy crunch.
Egypt is also pursuing the possibility of increasing its imports of gas from Israel by 58 per cent during the summer months, according to an unnamed government official quoted by Asharq Business.
If agreed upon, this will mean Egypt will import 1.5 billion cubic feet of Israeli gas per day. 'As in the case of the Cypriot gas, this is a good bargain, as this is piped gas which is much cheaper than the imported LNG alternative,' the official said.
He explained that the price of the piped gas was $4 for each Mobile Treatment Unit (mtu). Importing gas in the LNG form would add an extra $4 to $5 per mtu, representing the cost of the liquefaction, transport, insurance, and regasification, making the overall cost around $9 per mtu.
Egypt started to import Israeli gas in 2020. The original plan was to receive the gas through a pipeline, liquefy it, and export it to Europe. However, with the drop in local production, Egypt started to depend on Israeli gas to cover increased domestic demand.
The flow of gas was suspended for a while shortly after the fighting escalated with Hamas in Gaza, an incident that raises fears about the future of these supplies in case bilateral relations turn sour in the future.
Kamal said Egypt was well prepared for such a scenario.
All Egypt's power stations use dual fuel technology, which enables them to switch from one form of fuel to another. This means that the stations can switch from gas to Mazut seamlessly during operations without loss of power, he said.
Over and above the power-generation sector, the largest consumer of gas locally, the government has also introduced plans to control the waste and theft of electricity.
Kamal said that before these plans were implemented, the theft and waste of electricity resulted in losing 25 to 38 per cent of generated power. The amount of generated electricity per day hovers around an average of 36 Gigawatts (GW), which means that around eight to nine GW were being wasted.
'Cutting these losses means that the demand for gas and thus gas imports will be reduced,' Kamal noted.
Expected additions to the energy produced in Egypt during the coming years will make it less vulnerable to any disruptions in imported gas. There are new agreements for the production of solar and wind energy that will lead to the addition of five to six GW to the national grid starting in June.
In addition, Egypt's first-ever nuclear-generated power from the Al-Dabaa Plant will enter the grid in 2027-2028, with another five GW being added to the national network.
'The strategy to increase the renewables share in the energy mix to 42 per cent by 2030 or 2035 will lead to balancing the energy demand and supply forces,' Kamal said.
In parallel, Egypt is trying to secure more LNG imports. According to the CNN Business Arabic Website, the government will launch a tender for LNG shipments to meet heightened summer demand. This comes after finalising agreements totalling $3 billion in December to purchase 60 LNG shipments in 2025.
The increase in LNG imports has necessitated Egypt's renting more floating regasification units, making the total number of units rented reach four or five, according to different sources.
* A version of this article appears in print in the 27 February, 2025 edition of Al-Ahram Weekly
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Given high real interest rates, analysts expect the CBE to resume its monetary easing cycle with a one per cent rate cut, bringing the benchmark rate to 23 per cent in its 28 August meeting. Abdalla's term has seen the Egyptian pound strengthen by five per cent against the dollar since the beginning of 2025. Capital Economics noted that the currency remains competitive by most measures, which could support GDP growth and reduce risks associated with the current account deficit. After widening to more than six per cent of GDP at its peak last year, balance of payments data for the first quarter of this year showed that (on a four-quarter sum basis) the current account deficit narrowed to 4.8 per cent of GDP. Egypt's economy is projected to grow by between 3.5 per cent and 4.5 per cent in 2025, according to multiple international institutions. 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Tourism revenues climbed 15.4 per cent year-on-year to $12.5 billion, supported by a surge in tourist nights to 134.3 million, up from 116.4 million. These improvements were reflected in a drop in the cost of insuring Egypt's five-year sovereign debt, with credit default swaps (CDS) falling to 438 basis points, their lowest level in nearly four years. This decline signals reduced default risk, thanks to stronger foreign currency inflows. Historically, Egypt's CDS ranged between 257 and 325 basis points, but surged due to domestic economic challenges and global geopolitical tensions. Hany Genena, Head of Research at Ahly Pharos, noted on Facebook that while the current CDS level is 1.3 per cent above the historical average of 300 basis points, it remains encouraging despite a decline in natural gas production and delays in the IMF's fifth review of Egypt's loan agreement. He added that reaching 200 basis points would be optimal for Egypt's debt outlook. 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The likely appointment of former Egyptian foreign minister Nabil Fahmy as next chief of the Arab League promises a new lease of life for the pan-Arab organisation. It is only a matter of time before Cairo makes the official announcement of the nomination of its former top diplomat, Nabil Fahmy, as the next and ninth Arab League secretary general for a term of five years possibly renewable for a successive term. On Saturday evening, the Saudi magazine Al-Majalla quoted a diplomatic source as saying that Fahmy, foreign minister of Egypt from 2013 to 2015, will be the next chief of the close to 80-year-old Arab organisation. The news came after much speculation about the fate of the position that is set to be vacant shortly as the current League chief, Ahmed Abul-Gheit, is wrapping up his mission after two terms that started in June 2016. Like Fahmy, Abul-Gheit and almost every predecessor since the start of the organisation under King Farouk of Egypt in 1945 was a top Egyptian diplomat. 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With Egypt not wanting to lose the de facto right to the seat, it acted to accommodate two things: the first was the rotation of the top League job, and the second was coming up with a candidate who would be hard to decline or contest. The same sources said that Fahmy was not necessarily the first choice. However, he emerged as the best and most consensual candidate. 'Some capitals indicated that it was only if Fahmy was nominated that they would condone the continued Egyptian de facto right to the seat of secretary general, at least for this upcoming term,' they said. F AHMY'S TENURE: It was not immediately clear when Fahmy will be appointed. Technically speaking, Abul-Gheit's second term ends in mid-May 2026. However, given the fact that the standard practice is for the new secretary general to be approved by an Arab summit, the end of Abul-Gheit's tenure and the beginning of Fahmy's might have to wait for the next regular Arab Summit in March 2026. At least three sources said that this would be the case. A couple of others said that the nomination of Fahmy might be passed through either of two ways: the first would be the ordinary autumn foreign ministers' meeting due to convene in the first week of September; and the second would be at a possible emergency Arab summit over developments in Gaza. The situation there seems slated to deteriorate as Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu seems determined to move on with a plan to displace half of the Gaza population into the southernmost part of the Strip. For his part, Fahmy has declined to make any direct comments. Answering journalists' questions that started upon the publication of the story in Al-Majalla, the former top diplomat said that the issue was the prerogative of the Egyptian Foreign Service. However, unlike Prime Minister Mustafa Madbouli, speculated about as the leading nominee, Fahmy did not deny the news of the nomination. A source at the Egyptian Foreign Ministry said that there was no room either for speculation or anticipation. 'Fahmy is the consensual candidate. He has the support of most Arab capitals, including one that was considering running a candidate itself in order to start the practice of rotation,' the source said. He added that it is a formality for the nomination to be endorsed and for Fahmy to find his way to the office of secretary general at the League's Tahrir Square headquarters. Several sources, including some close to Fahmy himself, said that Egypt's former top diplomat, who was born in New York in 1951 and graduated from the American University in Cairo, was not expecting the nomination. Throughout his career in the Egyptian Foreign Service that started in the 1970s, Fahmy has seemed eligible for certain posts, including for his long-term post as Egypt's ambassador to Washington that started in 1999 and ended in 2008. When he came back from Washington, with an impressive performance in containing one of the highest periods of tension in Egyptian-American relations under the rule of former president Mubarak and during the two terms in office of US president George W Bush, Fahmy was expected to be appointed as foreign minister to succeed Abul-Gheit, who served as foreign minister from 2004 to 2011. However, with the January Revoulution things took a different path and it was only in June 2013 that Fahmy found his long-anticipated path to the office of Egypt's foreign minister overlooking the Nile prior to the move of government bodies to the New Administrative Capital. T OUGH MISSION: Fahmy came to the office at a crucial political moment, with considerable international speculation about the ouster of former president Mohamed Morsi after the 30 June 2013 revolution and the suspension of elements of Egyptian-American military cooperation and also the holding up of Egypt's membership of the African Union. At the time, Egyptian diplomats were saying that the country's diplomacy was on 'thin ice' following the political changes in 2013. During his almost one year in office, Fahmy told his aides that the key aim was to relaunch Egypt as a major regional power following two years of internal hiccups that had started with the 25 January Revolution and been followed by the 2013 ouster of Morsi in June 2012. One of Fahmy's closest aides at the time said that 'it is a very tough challenge that Fahmy is facing, since our foreign policy has been on the decline for a while. It did not start with Morsy. It had been this way during the last few years of Mubarak.' In his memoir, published originally in English in 2020 under the title Egypt's Diplomacy, in War, Peace and Transition and later in Arabic in 2022 under the title of Fi qalb al-ahdath (At the Heart of the News), Fahmy details the complexities of the 2013 moment that went beyond the international perception of the nature of political change in Egypt to include pending challenges and especially the dispute between Egypt and Sudan, on the one hand, and Ethiopia, on the other, over the construction, filling, and operation of the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam (GERD). Fahmy used his 12 months in office to remove the suspension of Egyptian membership in the AU, impose a ban on the financing of the GERD, and maximise the use of the support offered by some Arab Gulf capitals to open doors that were being shut in several world capitals. In conducting his mission as Egypt's top diplomat, Fahmy also kept an eye on some crucial files that he was very well informed about, especially as a member of Egypt's diplomatic mission in Geneva, and notably with regard to the non-proliferation of weapons of mass destruction in the Middle East. He was also very much aware of the centrality of the Palestinian cause, which he had worked on extensively during his years as political adviser to foreign minister Amr Moussa in the 1990s and during which he took part in the Egypt delegation to the Madrid Peace Conference and followed a sequence of Palestinian-Israeli talks from the 1993 signing of the Oslo Accords onwards. Reaching out for international cooperation was also a top priority that Fahmy was well aware of owing to his two ambassadorial terms in Tokyo and Washington. However, unlike the previous steps in his diplomatic career, Fahmy was working under very stressful conditions. He kept in close contact with then minister of defence Abdel-Fattah Al-Sisi, whose political rise was already charted. The coordination between the Foreign Service, on the one hand, and security and economic officials, on the other, is referenced in his memoir as part of the national sharing of responsibility regarding top foreign policy and national security issues. U PHEAVAL: 'Upheaval in the Middle East' is the title that Fahmy chose for the section of his book on the Arab-Israeli struggle. The starting point of the story, as perceived by Fahmy, was the devastating defeat of the Arab armies in the 1967 War that allowed Israel to occupy all of historic Palestine, all of the Sinai Peninsula, and large parts of Syrian and Jordanian territory. A second equally unsettling moment that Fahmy's book moves to after the 1967 War is another war and a 'moment of tectonic change in the Arab region [that] came with the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait in the summer of 1990.' This war, Fahmy, then a diplomat at the Egyptian mission in New York, had earlier seen signs of and had feared its overwhelming impact on the region. 'The Iraqi invasion entailed drastic and traumatic regional repercussions in the Arab world. It divided the Arab world, but most importantly it also prompted the Arab Gulf states to focus on sub-regional cooperation and become fully dependent on American security,' Fahmy wrote. 'For them, this was not simply a territorial disagreement between neighbouring Arab states but a fully-fledged existential invasion from within the Arab world itself, which was an anomaly in contemporary political relations.' Theories about connections between the October 1973 War and the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait are neither overlooked nor embraced by Fahmy. He writes that 'some Middle East experts suggest that after being shocked by the Arab oil embargo in 1973, the United States intentionally encouraged [former Iraqi president Saddam] Hussein to invade Kuwait in order to decimate the burgeoning Iraqi military capacity and emerging nuclear programme.' 'This was perceived by them as an attempt to preempt the emergence of a strong, more independent Arab regional player with control over substantial oil reserves and the potential to pose a security threat to Israel.' However, Fahmy's book is more about dissecting what happened on the ground than what the experts thought at the time. According to this part of his book, the 1990 Iraqi invasion of Kuwait crushed whatever semblance of pan-Arabism had survived the crushing military defeat of 1967. Consequently, he argued that a new regional order was in the making along with the pursuit of a political settlement to the Arab-Israeli struggle, with the participation of all the countries that had boycotted Egypt after former president Anwar Al-Sadat's peace-making with Israel. Today, as he prepares himself to enter a new chapter in his diplomatic career, Fahmy is only too aware of the crucial moment that the region is passing through. In an article published on the opinion pages of the Egyptian daily Al-Shorouq on 5 August under the title of 'The Necessary Choices for the Arab World,' Fahmy wrote that 'the Middle East is not stable and is going through a reshuffle moment.' Some of the changes that are unfolding today, he argued, are inevitable due to the natural evolution of political and economic dynamics, while others are being forced on it, especially as the aspirations of non-Arab members of the region, especially Israel, assume a dominating role. This, he wrote, is happening as the world order is going through a transition towards an undefined destination that may or may not take it from a single-polar to a multi-polar regime, with many countries building their policies on a zero-sum approach. With such changes happening, Fahmy wrote, the Arab World needs to live up to the challenges it is facing and to pursue development and reconstruction. Given the date of the publication of his piece, it is not hard to conclude that these are going to be the defining concepts that Fahmy will have in mind for his overall agenda for the future of the Arab League. It is no secret that he will need to use all his expertise on the Palestinian cause to help reconcile the conflicting views of the Arab capitals on the way forward in view of the genocidal war that Israel is conducting against the Palestinians in Gaza along with the resumption of aggressive and illegal settlement policies in the West Bank. In so doing, Fahmy will lean on his long years of bilateral and multilateral diplomacy, especially his close-to 10 years in Washington where he built solid ties in the capital of world politics. Meanwhile, there are also many other pressing challenges that he will need to attend to, including the current armed conflicts in Sudan, Somalia, and Syria, inter-Arab tensions in North Africa and the Gulf, and the expanding weight that non-Arab neighbours have taken in the Arab countries. In his piece, Fahmy spoke clearly against attempts to water down the Arab identity of the region. In an article published earlier this summer in the Saudi-owned Independent Arabia, he wrote about the need to fully re-integrate Syria into the Arab world and for a coordinated Arab position to face up to Israeli plans against Palestinian rights. According to diplomatic sources informed on the dynamics of the secretariat of the Arab League, one of Fahmy's tougher missions will be the creation of a sense of collective ownership, away from any sense of entitlement, towards this pan-Arab organisation that has come under much criticism, especially as a result of the genocidal war on Gaza. Those who know Fahmy well say that he will not just seek harmony but also innovation and creativity. His years as founding and long-serving dean of the School of Global Affairs and Public Policy at the American University in Cairo, they say, testify to his commitment to promoting modernisation. They also say that as much as Fahmy was very keen during his career to be credited for his own work rather than for being the son of a renowned foreign minister, Ismail Fahmy, he will be also keen in his new post to dispel concerns that his Egyptian nationality could impose an Egyptian perception on the agenda of the collective Arab regime. * A version of this article appears in print in the 21 August, 2025 edition of Al-Ahram Weekly Follow us on: Facebook Instagram Whatsapp Short link:
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