Wikipedia Deep Dive

Arab Gas Pipeline

10 min read

A Pipeline That Keeps Changing Its Mind

Imagine building a highway, only to have traffic flow backward a few years later. That's essentially what happened to the Arab Gas Pipeline—a 1,200-kilometer network of steel tubes snaking through some of the most politically volatile territory on Earth. It was designed to pump Egyptian natural gas north into Jordan, Syria, and Lebanon. But geopolitics, revolutions, and the discovery of massive offshore gas fields have turned this pipeline into something its builders never anticipated: a two-way street where the direction of flow depends on which country happens to have gas to spare.

The story of this pipeline is really the story of how energy infrastructure becomes hostage to forces far beyond engineering.

The Original Vision

In the early 2000s, Egypt sat on substantial natural gas reserves and saw an opportunity. Its neighbors—Jordan, Syria, and Lebanon—needed fuel for their power plants. The math seemed simple: build a pipeline, sell gas, collect revenue.

Construction began near Arish, a city on Egypt's Sinai Peninsula overlooking the Mediterranean. The first section ran 250 kilometers overland through the Sinai's harsh desert terrain, then dove underwater for 15 kilometers across the Gulf of Aqaba to reach Jordan. This initial stretch cost $220 million and was completed in July 2003.

The engineering was straightforward enough. A 36-inch diameter pipe—about the width of a café table—with compressor stations every 200 kilometers to keep the gas moving. At full capacity, it could push 10.3 billion cubic meters of natural gas per year. That's enough to heat roughly 5 million homes.

From Jordan's Red Sea port of Aqaba, the pipeline extended north through the desert, passing near Amman before reaching El Rehab, just 24 kilometers from the Syrian border. This 390-kilometer section cost $300 million and came online in 2005.

Reaching Syria and Beyond

The third section pushed into Syria, running 319 kilometers from the Jordanian border to the Al Rayan gas compressor station near Homs. Along the way, it supplied the Deir Ali and Tishreen power stations—critical infrastructure for a country chronically short of electricity.

This section was completed in February 2008. Notably, it was built partly by Stroytransgaz, a subsidiary of Russia's Gazprom. Even then, Russian energy interests were threading through Middle Eastern infrastructure.

From Homs, a branch line continued to the Syrian coastal city of Baniyas, then jumped underwater to Tripoli, Lebanon. Regular gas deliveries to Lebanon's Deir Ammar power station began in October 2009.

For a brief moment, the Arab Gas Pipeline was doing exactly what it was designed to do: moving Egyptian gas to power plants across four countries.

The Dream of Reaching Europe

Ambitions grew larger. In 2006, Egypt, Syria, Jordan, Turkey, Lebanon, and Romania signed an agreement to extend the pipeline all the way to Turkey's border. From there, it would connect to the proposed Nabucco Pipeline—an ambitious project meant to deliver Middle Eastern gas to Europe while bypassing Russia.

Turkey expected to buy up to 4 billion cubic meters annually. A 63-kilometer segment between Aleppo in Syria and Kilis in Turkey was actually completed in May 2011 by a Czech company called PLYNOSTAV Pardubice Holding.

But by then, everything had changed.

Revolution and Sabotage

On January 25, 2011, Egyptians took to the streets demanding the removal of President Hosni Mubarak. Within 18 days, his 30-year rule collapsed. And almost immediately, the Arab Gas Pipeline became a target.

On February 5, just days after the protests began, an explosion rocked the pipeline near the El Arish compressor station. Gas supplies to Israel and Jordan stopped.

This was only the beginning.

Between early 2011 and October 2014, the pipeline suffered at least 26 separate attacks. Most targeted GASCO's feeder pipeline in the northern Sinai, which supplied the main Arab Gas Pipeline system.

The attackers were primarily Bedouin groups who had long complained of economic neglect and discrimination by the Cairo government. The Sinai Peninsula—that triangular wedge of desert between mainland Egypt and Israel—had always been treated as a buffer zone rather than a place where people actually lived. The Bedouin who called it home had few opportunities and many grievances. Blowing up a gas pipeline was a way to make Cairo pay attention.

Armed men with machine guns would force the guards to leave, plant explosives, and disappear into the desert. The explosions became so routine that repair crews could barely finish fixing one breach before another occurred.

The Israel Complication

Running parallel to the main Arab Gas Pipeline was a more politically sensitive branch: the Arish-Ashkelon pipeline. This 90-kilometer underwater line connected Egypt directly to Israel, carrying gas beneath the Mediterranean to the Israeli coastal city of Ashkelon.

Officially, this pipeline wasn't part of the Arab Gas Pipeline project. But it branched from the same Egyptian infrastructure and used the same gas.

The pipeline had been controversial from the start. Egypt agreed to supply Israel with 1.7 billion cubic meters of natural gas annually—later raised to 2.1 billion—at prices that many Egyptians considered far below market rates. By 2010, this single pipeline supplied roughly half of Israel's natural gas needs, making Israel one of Egypt's most important energy customers.

Egyptian activists tried to challenge the deal in court, arguing the prices were unconscionably low. The Mubarak government dismissed these challenges. Then Mubarak fell.

After the revolution, public sentiment turned sharply against the gas deal. Why should Egypt sell gas cheaply to Israel while Egyptians faced electricity shortages? In April 2012, Egypt officially cancelled the agreement.

The official explanation was economic: Israel had missed payment deadlines. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu publicly agreed, saying the cancellation wasn't political. But others saw it differently. Former Israeli defense minister Shaul Mofaz called it "a new low in relations between the countries and a clear violation of the peace treaty."

What followed was years of international arbitration. The International Court of Arbitration of the International Chamber of Commerce in Geneva eventually ruled against Egypt, ordering it to pay approximately $2 billion in damages. Egypt appealed to Swiss courts and lost again. Finally, in 2019, a settlement was reached: Egypt would pay Israel Electric Corporation $500 million over eight and a half years.

The Great Reversal

While lawyers argued, something remarkable was happening beneath the Mediterranean.

Israel had discovered enormous offshore natural gas deposits. The Tamar field came online in 2013. The even larger Leviathan field began production in late 2019. Suddenly, Israel had more gas than it knew what to do with.

Meanwhile, Egypt's domestic gas production had plummeted. The country that once exported gas now faced chronic shortages. Power plants ran intermittently. Factories shut down.

The solution was almost poetic in its irony: reverse the pipeline.

From 2015 to 2018, Jordan imported liquefied natural gas through a new terminal at Aqaba, then sent some of it south through the Arab Gas Pipeline to Egypt. Gas that was supposed to flow north was now flowing south.

Then came an even bigger reversal. In 2018, the consortium operating Israel's Tamar and Leviathan fields paid $518 million to buy a 39% stake in EMG—the company operating the Arish-Ashkelon pipeline. The goal was to begin exporting Israeli gas to Egypt.

Think about that for a moment. A pipeline built to send Egyptian gas to Israel was being retrofitted to send Israeli gas to Egypt. The same infrastructure, the same route, just flowing the other way.

Test flows began in 2019. Commercial operations started in 2020.

Egypt's Recovery

Egypt's fortunes changed with the discovery of the Zohr gas field in 2015. Located in deep water about 190 kilometers off the Egyptian coast, Zohr turned out to be the largest gas field ever found in the Mediterranean. When it came online in 2017 and ramped up production, Egypt went from gas importer back to gas exporter in just a few years.

By 2018, Egyptian gas was once again flowing north to Jordan through the Arab Gas Pipeline. But the system had grown more complex. Israeli gas was now also entering the network through a new 65-kilometer pipeline connecting Israel to the Arab Gas Pipeline near Mafraq in northern Jordan.

This creates an interesting redundancy. If attacks in the Sinai disrupt the Egyptian section, Israeli gas can still reach Jordan through the northern connection. If something goes wrong in the north, Egyptian gas can flow through the southern route. The pipeline network has become more resilient precisely because it can now be fed from multiple sources.

The Turkey Connection Finally Opens

Remember that segment to Turkey that was completed in 2011, just as everything was falling apart? It sat dormant for over a decade. The Syrian civil war made any trans-Syrian pipeline operations essentially impossible.

But as of August 2025, this segment has finally opened. Gas can now theoretically flow from the Eastern Mediterranean all the way to Turkey's border. Whether it will connect to European markets as originally envisioned remains uncertain—the Nabucco Pipeline was never built, a casualty of changing economics and Russian competition.

What Jordan Sees

For Jordan, the Arab Gas Pipeline has been both blessing and curse. The country has almost no domestic energy resources. It imports roughly 95% of its energy needs. Having access to pipeline gas—whether from Egypt, Israel, or eventually other sources—is essential for keeping the lights on and factories running.

But dependence on imported gas also means vulnerability. When Egyptian supplies were disrupted in the early 2010s, Jordan's electricity costs soared. The country had to import expensive diesel and heavy fuel oil to keep power plants running. This contributed to budget deficits and economic strain.

Jordan's recent push into renewable energy—solar and wind farms sprouting across its sun-drenched deserts—is partly a response to this vulnerability. Diversifying energy sources means less exposure to the next pipeline attack or the next regional crisis.

The Bigger Picture

The Arab Gas Pipeline illustrates a fundamental truth about energy infrastructure: it outlasts the political arrangements that created it. The pipeline was conceived in a world where Mubarak ruled Egypt, Assad ruled Syria without civil war, and Israeli-Arab relations followed Cold Peace protocols. None of those conditions still hold.

Yet the pipeline remains. Its steel tubes don't care about revolutions or peace treaties. They carry gas in whichever direction economics and politics dictate.

The recent years have seen an unexpected convergence. Egypt, Israel, and Jordan now share an interconnected gas network. Israeli gas flows to Egyptian processing plants, which then export liquefied natural gas to Europe. Egyptian gas flows to Jordan. The former adversaries have become energy partners, bound together by infrastructure that was built before anyone imagined such cooperation.

Whether this interdependence promotes peace or simply creates new points of vulnerability is an open question. The Bedouin attacks demonstrated how easily a pipeline can be disrupted by determined opponents with basic explosives. The reversal of flow showed how quickly supply relationships can flip. The arbitration over the canceled Israeli contract showed how these agreements can entangle countries in decades of legal disputes.

For now, gas flows through the Arab Gas Pipeline in ways its builders never anticipated. And somewhere in the planning offices of Cairo, Amman, and Tel Aviv, engineers are probably sketching out the next proposed extension—perhaps a 70-kilometer overland line from Israel to the Sinai, creating yet another connection in this increasingly tangled web of pipes and politics.

The pipeline's story isn't over. In this part of the world, it never is.