Filenews 15 June 2022
The European Union wants to "strengthen" its energy cooperation with Israel, in response to the "blackmail" of Russia, said yesterday the President of the European Commission Ursula von der Leyen, who is visiting Israel. However, this cooperation, even if agreed between the Commission and the Israeli government, cannot be implemented at a time that serves the great needs that will arise in the winter for gas for European countries, if in the meantime relations with Moscow and There should be restrictions on Russian gas supplies, let alone an embargo on imports from Gazprom. "The Kremlin has used our dependence on Russian fossil fuels to blackmail us," von der Layen said in a speech at Ben-Gurion University in the Negev. "The Kremlin's behaviour only succeeds in strengthening our will to free ourselves from our dependence on Russian mineral energy," von der Leyen said.
"For example, we are currently exploring ways to strengthen our energy co-operation with Israel," he said, referring to the scheduling of a submarine cable that will connect Israel, Cyprus and Greece (but which could "move In the first phase (about a thousand megawatts only), as well as a "pipeline" in the eastern Mediterranean, the construction of which will take years, unless the existing infrastructure connecting Israel and Egypt is used for limited quantities. Agence France-Presse points out that Israel has three options to export some of its gas to Europe: to channel its natural gas to Egypt, with which it is already connected to a pipeline, which will then liquefy it and transport it by ship to Europe, to build a gas pipeline to Turkey or to build a new pipeline (East Med) directly to the south of Europe. Russian gas supplies to Germany fell by 40% Russia's Gazprom announced yesterday that it had reduced the capacity of its gas supply to Germany by more than 40% via the Nord Stream 1 gas pipeline, as the German group Siemens did not export necessary equipment to Russia. "Gas deliveries via the Nord Stream pipeline can only be guaranteed up to the level of 100 million cubic meters per day, compared to the projected 167 cubic meters per day," Gazprom said in a statement posted on the Telegram. Gazprom has already cut off gas supplies to Poland, Bulgaria, Finland and companies in the Netherlands and Denmark because buyers did not adopt the new payment system under the well-known Putin decree.