NOV 29, 2015 Christopher Coats
Continuing a multi-administration push to bolster Greece’s status as an energy actor in the Eastern Mediterranean, Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras headed to Jerusalem in hopes of establishing the country’s role as regional energy hub.
According to local media reports, Tsipras recently headed to Israel for a summit with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu regarding host of regional issues, chief among them the potential for Greece to join in on an Eastern Mediterranean energy boom.
“One of the main issues in our talks today were the opportunities arising in the fields of energy, the fields of energy in the East Mediterranean,” Tsipras told reporters, according to a media report. “We are considering ways on cooperation in research, drilling and transportation of gas from Israel to Europe.”
Over the last four years, Athens has also made a concerted effort to lay claim to the Eastern Mediterranean’s recent energy rush, both as a potential transport hub for Israeli and Cypriot gas reserves. Earlier this year, Athens entered the transport conversation by offering a tender for a pipeline project that would transport about 8 billion cubic meters of gas into the European market from offshore fields controlled by Cyprus and Israel.
Under both Tsipras’s administration, as well the country’s previous leadership, Greece has moved to promote the country domestic energy potential as well as its role as a possible transport hub for energy development bound for Europe.
During that same period, Europe has also moved to explore new natural gas import options, easing dependence on increasingly insecure producers in Russia.
While Israel has led the regional energy push over the last several years, efforts to move natural gas out of the region has faced some domestic and production obstacles – a situation that Greece hopes it can at least partially address.
“The purpose of the meetings is to try to identify the exact fields of cooperation and how to build on these fields in order to develop… energy,” Tsipras said at a joint press conference with Netanyahu.
Tsipras said that Greece could meet with Cyprus and Israel to explore what options could be available to for transporting natural gas northwards and into an anxious European market as early as January of next year.
Both prime ministers suggested that energy is just one of many issues that they can collaborate on in the near future, easing a long history of tension that has plagued diplomatic ties between the two countries.
“We’re the two democracies in the eastern Mediterranean and we are obviously aware that we have a world of opportunities – of technology, of development, of progress – to seize and we can seize it better through cooperation. But equally we also understand that there are great challenges before us,” Netanyahu reportedly told Tsipras, “especially very violent religious fundamentalism that seeks to sweep our world, is sweeping the Middle East, is sweeping North Africa and Europe and other parts of the world.”
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