BEIRUT (Middle East Eye) – Before Lebanon can reap any major benefits from its lucrative offshore gas and oil reserves, the country will have to resolve its maritime border dispute with Syria.
The two countries’ maritime zones overlap by about 750 sq km, including a region where Syria has awarded contracts to two Russian companies to begin oil and gas exploration in the territory Lebanon also claims.
Lebanon in October resolved its maritime dispute with the Zionist regime under a deal, which paved the way for French oil giant TotalEnergies and Italy’s ENI to begin natural gas exploration in the Qana field in the southern waters.
However, until Lebanon’s maritime borders with Cyprus and Syria are clearly demarcated, companies will remain reluctant to invest in gas and oil exploration in the rest of Lebanon’s maritime zone, leaving the majority of the country’s potential reserves still inaccessible.
Cyprus, after the U.S.-mediated agreement cleared its worry of upsetting the Zionist regime, is now ready to demarcate its borders with Lebanon. But the maritime zones of Lebanon, Syria and Cyprus are linked by one point, requiring Syria’s say in the matter.
“We will not delineate with Cyprus until we communicate with Syria,” Lebanon’s deputy speaker of parliament and border negotiator Elias Bou Saab said after the signing of the Lebanon-Israel agreement.
For Lebanon, which imports 97 percent of its energy supplies, delineating its borders with Syria has “tremendous value”, Sami Nader, director of the Beirut-based Levant Institute for Strategic Affairs, told Middle East Eye.
The recoverable offshore reserves are estimated to hold 25.4 trillion cubic feet of natural gas, part of the lucrative Levant Basin with an estimated 122 tfc of recoverable gas and 1.7 billion barrels of recoverable oil.
The bidding round for exploration in the remaining eight blocks in Lebanon’s offshore exclusive economic zone was to close on 15 December, Laury Haytayan, the MENA director at the New York-based National Resource Governance Institute, told MEE.
Haytayan noted, however, that companies are unlikely to invest with the maritime borders still unclear.
Nader said: “International companies want an official demarcation between the governments. Without a kind of demarcation, no company will come.”