FT makes a case for East Med to export gas to Europe via Egypt: Not recognizing that Egypt is the most obvious (and economical) path for East Mediterranean countries to export gas from the Levantine Deep Marine Basin to Europe would be a waste of opportunity, according to the Financial Times’ editorial board. Egypt is ahead of the curve with its infrastructure, and the swift progress on the development of Zohr makes it the most convenient country to export gas to the EU. “The development of the Israeli, Lebanese and Cypriot fields is more fraught. With limited domestic markets all three will need to find external buyers at a time when world gas markets are close to saturated. The most pragmatic and practical near term path to outside markets would be to build a network of short pipelines and tap into Egypt’s [largely idle] LNG plants.”

The FT also criticised the EU’s preferred method for importing the gas — via a 2,000 km long and 3 km deep pipeline from the eastern Mediterranean to Italy. While being questionable commercially due to the how cumbersome and slow paced the development of such a project would take, the move could also see the EU squander an opportunity for regional integration, says the salmon-colored paper.

In other gas related news, the US has beat Egypt to the punch and become a net exporter of gas for the first time since 1957, Bloomberg reports. Net exports averaged about 0.4 bcf/d last year, flipping from net inflows of 1.8 bcf/d in 2016, according to Victoria Zaretskaya, a Washington-based analyst for the US Energy Information Administration.