Τα υποθαλάσσια κοιτάσματα φυσικού αερίου αυξάνουν την σημασία της Κύπρου

Race to tap fuel is on, adding profit motive to island’s political tension

‘‘Maybe Turkey can produce first, or maybe Cyprus can produce first. We just don’t know yet.’’

This island has long been synonymous with division. It is home to one of Europe’s most intractable conflicts, which came to a head with the invasion by Turkish forces 38 years ago. Since then, Cyprus has been divided between a Turkish occupied North and Greekspeaking South.
If the fight over its rugged land were not enough, Cyprus is now the focus of a new contest: control over the significant natural gas wealth found late last year in nearby waters, raising the question of whether the discovery will become an incentive for the two sides to cooperate or yet another obstacle to their reunification.
The early indications point to the latter. The bounty is rich enough that in just a few short months, the discovery has heightened worries of increased tension that could even draw in outside powers, from the region and beyond. The race to see who can tap the gas first, in full swing this summer, has added a new layer of potential instability along Europe’s southern fringe, where the euro crisis has sown political and economic turmoil and where relations between nations — like Greece and Turkey, and Turkey and Israel — are already fraught.
An American company, Noble Energy, based in Houston, is leading the drilling in Cypriot waters, along with Israeli partners, giving both the United States and Israel huge stakes in the find. They are working with Greek Cypriot leaders, many of whom regard the undersea area as theirs to exploit as they please, at least for now.
Northerners, backed by Turkey, say Cypriot drilling is illegal because the plans have gone ahead without taking into account their competing claims to the island and surrounding waters. They have called on companies to halt drilling, and on Cyprus to freeze further licensing.
Turkey has threatened to send its navy. To underscore its displeasure, in recent months Turkey has erected a large oil and gas exploration rig above this village near the coast of Northern Cyprus, and festooned it with flags.
‘‘Maybe war could explode again here,’’ said Fikret Akan, 29, a Turkishspeaking resident of Sinirustu, who works at a fuel depot in a nearby coastal town. ‘‘Turkey, Israel and the United States all could start fighting over these resources.’’
Though the United Nations, which supervises a buffer zone running the length of the island, has hailed the gas discoveries as a way of generating wealth that could fund a reunification of the island, Mr. Akan’s fears may not be entirely unfounded.
Even before any gas has been tapped, the discoveries have created ‘‘risks, big risks, as well as a myriad of legal issues,’’ acknowledged Richard L. Morningstar, the former U.S. special envoy for Eurasian energy, in March. The issues ‘‘go beyond Cyprus, they go beyond Israel, they go beyond Greece — they affect the whole region,’’ he said.
This year, the United States established its first regional headquarters for a new Bureau of Energy Resources in Cyprus. Although it, too, has urged a fair distribution of wealth resources, Washington has strongly supported the right of Cyprus, a member of the European Union, to drill inside its exclusive economic zone.
That forceful backing may have helped blunt any willingness of Cypriot leaders to split any oil and gas wealth with their Northern half at this stage. ‘‘Don’t speak about sharing,’’ Neoclis Sylikiotis, the Cypriot energy minister, said during a recent interview. Splitting revenue would happen only after a solution to the division of the island, he said.
As attitudes harden, the Northerners have mapped out blocks of the eastern Mediterranean for licensing that roughly overlap waters claimed by Cyprus, and they have begun their own onshore explorations — starting in Sinirustu.
Cypriot officials like Mr. Sylikiotis have dismissed the endeavor at Sinirustu — a village they call by its Greek name, Syngrasis — as nothing more than a theatrical stunt.
Yet drilling in Sinirustu was going full bore in July. A heady, sulfurous odor created by the mix of drilling fluids and mud hung in the air despite a warm breeze.
Clad in red overalls bearing the logo of the Turkish Petroleum Corp., and sharing watermelon with his colleagues in one of the dozens of air-conditioned trailers that surround the rig, Ekrem Akyuz, 29, one of the Turkish engineers overseeing the site, said the geological data were being kept unusually secure.
That made it hard to judge whether the area was promising, Mr. Akyuz said. But he said the project was technically similar to wells he had dug in other parts of the world.
‘‘Maybe Turkey can produce first, or maybe Cyprus can produce first,’’ Mr. Akyuz said. ‘‘We just don’t know yet.’’

Commercializing the gas is still years away, and some analysts say that leaves time — probably until 2019 — to develop solutions.

‘‘There has got to be a way to put the conflict on the back burner and to create conditions for both sides to reap benefits,’’ said Michael Leigh, a senior adviser to the German Marshall Fund in Brussels who is leading a series of studies on hydrocarbon finds in the eastern Mediterranean.

Mr. Leigh said he expected Turkey to be careful to avoid an outright conflict over the gas because that would upset the United States. ‘‘You can never rule out inadvertent accidents and hostilities, but the broad diplomatic logic is that Turkey will not up the ante in Cyprus too much,’’ he said.

Cyprus sits next to the Levant Basin, which the United States Geological Survey has estimated to hold 122 trillion cubic feet of gas, or 3.5 trillion cubic meters, enough to supply the entire world with natural gas for about a year.

Noble has announced finds amounting to 35 trillion cubic feet of natural gas with the majority in Israeli waters and about 7 trillion cubic feet in Cypriot waters.

Relations between Cyprus and Turkey worsened drastically a year ago, when Noble began drilling in so-called Block 12, parts of which are also claimed by the North.

Experts said gas exports from Cyprus could add up to a substantial portion of its annual output of about $25 billion. With no firm production volumes, such estimates are extremely speculative.

Even so, if Cyprus were able to begin exports by the early 2020s, the country could earn $2.2 billion to $3.1 annually at current prices, assuming production volumes of 7 billion to 10 billion cubic meters of gas, said Sohbet Karbuz, the director of hydrocarbons at the Observatoire Méditerranéen de l’Énergie, an association of Mediterranean energy companies.

The potential volumes could be equally important to Turkey, which imports most of its oil and gas. Growth in Turkish energy demand has been among the fastest in the world in recent years, which has made it eager to tap new sources. Ankara has acknowledged that one vessel chartered by Turkish Petroleum had made seismic surveys on behalf of the North in waters overlapping Cypriot claims.

Despite the saber rattling by Ankara, 15 companies and consortia including Marathon Oil of the United States and Enel of Italy bid this year on nine additional blocks. Ankara has since warned those companies they ‘‘will in no way be allowed to take part in Turkey’s future energy projects.’’ It also pledged to ‘‘give every support’’ to enforce the territorial claims by Northern Cyprus.

The drilling also has become entangled in a bitter rupture between Turkey and Israel. Once friends, the countries have been at loggerheads since an Israeli commando raid two years ago on an aid vessel bound for Gaza called the Mavi Marmara. Nine Turks died in the raid.

Israel has since turned to Cyprus as a regional partner, signing defense and cooperation agreements this year partly aimed at protecting their overlapping gas fields.

In May the tensions between Turkey and Israel spread to the skies above Cyprus, when the Turkish Army command said its fighter jets had chased an Israeli plane out of Northern airspace. That same month, the Cypriot government had to deny a Turkish news report that Israel planned to deploy 20,000 commandos in Cyprus to protect Israelis working on energy projects.

Turkey has insisted that its military presence in the eastern Mediterranean consists of regular patrols and training exercises, in accordance with international law.

An alliance with Israel could be vital in helping Cyprus protect facilities to produce and deliver liquefied natural gas, or L.N.G., directly to Europe and other parts of the world, thereby bypassing the North and Turkey.

But an L.N.G. plant could cost around $10 billion, a level of financing that poses a huge challenge given falling gas prices and the poor credit rating of Cyprus, which, in June, became the fifth member of the euro zone to seek an international bailout.

The fickle politics of the Middle East are another potential obstacle for Cypriot ambitions.

‘‘What if Turkey and Israel find some face-saving way for Israel to apologize for the Marmara incident, and Israel pipes gas direct to Turkey?’’ asked Fiona Mullen, the director of Sapienta Economics in Nicosia. ‘‘Cyprus could be left high and dry.’’ 

International Herald Tribune 
30/08/2012