OREANDA-NEWS. November 20, 2015. Ask an oceanographer about the Eastern Mediterranean Basin, and he might mention a sea-floor dotted with mud volcanoes spewing gas and sometimes oil into the benthic environment.

Ask a geologist, and she may wax lyrical about sediment columns up to 12 km thick, generously capped by “evaporite,” i.e. dirty rock salt.

Both sets of observations have led to speculation that the entire region bounded on three sides by the politically fractious arc of Greece, Turkey, Syria, Lebanon, Israel and Egypt may be a cache for gigantic oil and gas deposits trapped in generous formations of porous carbonate rock beneath impermeable salt.

That theory is coming up trumps following a series of massive sub-salt gas strikes since 2007 offshore Israel, Cyprus and Egypt.

They culminated late August when Eni discovered the Zohr gas field, offshore Egypt’s Nile Delta, which had such a thick pay zone that the company had no qualms about issuing an initial resource estimate of 30 trillion cubic feet of gas, equivalent to about 5.5 billion barrels of oil.

Immediately following the announcement, Egyptian and company officials huddled to sketch out an accelerated development scheme, aiming to deliver on Egyptian president Abdel-Fatah el-Sisi’s promise to end Egypt’s troublesome domestic gas shortages.

There is also hope large oil deposits lurk beneath Mediterranean salt, especially in the north of its eastern basin, where oil seeps from mud volcanoes have been noted.

The US Geological Survey first assessed an Eastern Mediterranean area known as the Levant Basin, extending from Egypt in the south to Turkey in the north, in 2010, estimating its mean undiscovered, technically recoverable resources at 122 tcf of gas and 1.7 billion barrels of oil. However, there was upside potential for as much as 227 tcf of gas and 3.8 billion barrels of oil.

Perhaps because of the potential for oil discoveries as well as gas, a May 2013 move by Lebanon’s Ministry of Energy and Water to launch the country’s first licensing round for offshore exploration attracted considerable interest, with 12 companies being pre-qualified to bid including international heavyweights ExxonMobil, Chevron, Shell and Total, and regional specialists Eni and Repsol. But the Lebanese cabinet delayed issuing decrees delineating offshore blocks and has so far failed to provide a model exploration and production agreement.

Nothing further has been heard about the proposed Lebanese licensing round since the extended bid deadline of August 14, 2014, passed just as international oil prices began a steep descent from which they have not recovered.

The new era of low oil prices has seen international oil companies slash spending while taking pains to direct what remains of their exploration budgets towards opportunities in regions that could pay off with major discoveries, and where political and logistic barriers to development are low.

Politics hinder oil development, majors focus on natural gas

The unexplored waters offshore Lebanon could still attract attention under the first criterion, but not the second, given the country’s dismal track record in recent decades of government mismanagement of resources along with deeply embedded political tensions between neighbors in the entire northeastern Mediterranean region. Those include especially intractable disputes such as Lebanon’s with Israel, and Turkey’s with Greece over Cyprus, which have left many of the region’s maritime international borders in dispute.

Instead, international oil companies now seem to have turned their attention to the altogether gassier prospects offshore Egypt. In October, BP, Eni and Total between them snapped up three new EGAS offshore concessions. One license, in which BP has a 100% stake, is for a large area immediately southwest of Eni’s Shark Block, on which Zohr is located.

Edison and Petroceltic are poring over 3-D seismic data from Egypt’s promising North Thekah deepwater Mediterranean block, awarded by EGAS in 2013, planning where to drill the first well.
For the moment, gas exploration in the south seems the safer proposition, especially with potential markets to Egypt’s north and south.

Ironically, there is now a distinct possibility that large volumes of Egyptian gas could in future find their way to Saudi oil fields for injection into mature reservoirs that have lost their oomph. In the long term, Riyadh’s ability to continue with its current policy of pumping up the kingdom’s crude output to protect market share could be heavily dependent on further sub-salt gas discoveries off Egypt’s Mediterranean coast. — Tamsin Carlisle