https://www.jewishpolicycenter.org/insight/
An important pipeline project in the Mediterranean has been caught in a web of conflicting security and energy policy across Europe and beyond. To prevent an energy crisis for our allies and take away Russian leverage, the Biden administration should restore full American support to the project.
The EastMed Pipeline was designed to bring natural gas from the offshore fields of Israel and Cyprus across Greece to Italy and Bulgaria. In 2013, the European Commission designated the pipeline a “Project of Common Interest” and invested tens of millions of dollars in technical, economic and environmental studies. It was estimated that the pipeline could send as much as 20 billion cubic meters of gas to Europe annually. In 2019, the energy ministers of Cyprus, Egypt, France, Greece, Israel, Italy, Jordan and the Palestinian Authority created the East Mediterranean Gas Forum. Notice that Turkey, a NATO member, was not included.
At the end of 2020, Congress passed legislation that included support for constructing pipelines and liquified natural gas terminals, and created a United States-Eastern Mediterranean Energy Center run by the U.S. Department of Energy. Then-secretary of energy Dan Brouillette announced his department’s support for the project.
America’s friends and allies banded together to increase and diversify energy supplies in Europe. So, why—in 2022—would the Biden administration privately and unofficially tell a Greek official that the U.S. no longer supports the project?
EastMed, as it turns out, is in the crossfire of economic, foreign and energy policy across a number of very different countries, continents and operating philosophies.