Greece’s gas dreams are just a part of its enormous energy ambitions

Greece is looking into a nexus of electricity cables and possible pipelines that would make it a production and import-export energy hub

Energean’s Floating Production, Storage and Offloading platform being towed through Suez in June 2022

In recent days, the Greek government has revealed that it has been quietly conducting new surveys for undersea oil and gas in the Ionian and in the Mediterranean south of Crete. It intends to attract a new round of tenders to confirm probable deposits through exploratory drilling by 2025, and extract the first Greek gas by 2028 – the year Greece plans to stop burning lignite coal, its main domestically produced hydrocarbon to date.

Effectively, Greece will be replacing one hydrocarbon with another, which produces about a third of the CO2 emissions of Greece’s dirty coal. It will, by then, also be using almost no hydrocarbons to produce electricity. Greece’s new 2030 goal, shortly to be enshrined in its National Energy and Climate Plan, is to produce 80% of electricity from renewable sources. Greek gas, then, will mainly be intended for heating and export to Europe.

Going into production by 2028 is a tight schedule, but recent experience in the east Mediterranean suggests it is feasible. Egypt discovered its largest deposit, Zohr, in 2015, and had put it into production by the end of 2018, becoming energy-independent that year. Israel discovered its largest deposit, Leviathan, in mid-2014, and the field had gone into production by 2019.