How Israel dodged Hormuz energy crisis while others reel from the blow

Israel’s Karish natural gas field in the east Mediterranean.

Photo: Reuters Iran’s chokehold on the Strait of Hormuz has thrown the global economic system into turmoil, yet Israel, which launched attacks on Tehran alongside the United States, has emerged as a rare exception.

Since Israel and its US ally started the Middle East war on February 28, economies from Asia to Europe and the US have come under pressure from surging oil and natural gas prices that have driven up fuel and electricity costs.

Israel, however, has remained largely insulated from the shock.

Central to this has been a trio of major gas fields sitting deep below the Mediterranean. “The discovery of offshore natural gas has allowed Israel to be in a situation where it isn’t feeling the economic pinch on the energy front the way that other countries are,” said Gabriel Mitchell, energy security analyst and Visiting Policy Fellow at the German Marshall Fund.

Natural gas, all of which comes from those three fields, now accounts for 70 per cent of Israel’s electricity generation and 45 per cent of its total energy supply, according to the International Energy Agency.

The sale of that gas is governed by long-term, fixed-price contracts which have helped keep prices steady despite the war.

Nevertheless, the conflict has still affected Israel’s gas production.

At the outbreak of the war, Israel ordered energy giants Chevron and Energean to suspend operations at two of the three fields, Leviathan and Karish respectively, as a precaution against potential missile strikes.

The shutdowns also cut off exports to neighbouring Egypt and Jordan, which take the vast majority of Leviathan’s output.

A strike on a pressurised, operational gas field would be devastating, said Amit Mor, a senior lecturer at Reichman University. “Once a platform is hit by a missile, the explosion might be enormous and might be a total loss which takes years and billions of dollars to rebuild,” he said.

That leaves the Tamar field as Israel’s energy lifeline.

Producing roughly 11 billion cubic metres (BCM) of gas annually, Tamar nearly covers Israel’s entire domestic consumption of 12 to 13 BCM of gas per year. “Tamar is the existential one,” Mitchell said. “Israel can live without exporting natural gas to its neighbours.

It can live without operating the Karish field temporarily.

But from a national security perspective, Tamar is essential.” A closed petrol station in the Israeli-occupied West Bank city of Nablus o

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