Charles Ellinas

Egypt desperately needs a major gas discovery to shore up its declining production

I participated at FLAME 2024, Europe's lead natural gas conference, in Amsterdam end April. The theme of the conference was ‘Navigating the energy trilemma' and LNG featured prominently.

Implications of Euro-elections on European energy The headline in the FT following the June elections in Europe was: ‘Europe's green

“The Netherlands’ reputation of being one of the more cooperative EU member states may well become a thing of the past,” with policy challenges expected in migration, climate and agriculture.

By Charles Ellinas Eni, the Italian multinational energy company, published its ‘Capital Markets Update' on 14th March focusing on ‘a

Europe and the European Commission (EC) consider electricity grid interconnections between member states as strategically important, contributing to Europe's energy security. They offer economic efficiency, provide reliability to the electricity systems and facilitate increased uptake of renewable electricity, thus speeding-up energy transition and emission reduction. In support of this, the EU has set an interconnection target of at least 15 per cent by 2030 to encourage EU countries to interconnect their installed electricity production capacity, thus unifying Europe's electricity market. Most of Europe has achieved a rate between 10 per cent – 15 per cent, including Greece. Cyprus is the last EU member state to remain isolated without electricity interconnection.

Good news on the Great Sea Interconnector (GSI) front, but priority must now shift to implementing measures that will bring electricity prices down between now and 2030, when the GSI is expected to become operational. The price paid in Cyprus is among the highest in Europe because the island is still 80 per cent reliant on using expensive and high CO2-emitting diesel/HFO for power generation.

Barriers to d ecarboni s ing the r egional e conom ies was one of the subjects covered at the ‘Climate Crisis in the East Med and the Middle

It has been over two-and-a-half years since ExxonMobil last drilled in Cyprus’ EEZ, but the company is about to come back. In an interview earlier this month the minister of energy, Giorgos Papanastasiou, confirmed that ExxonMobil is planning a new exploration drilling programme in Cyprus’ EEZ. This will start early…

Eurostat has just published its report on EU electricity price statistics for the first half of 2024. A subject close to the heart of long-suffering Cypriot electricity consumers. Unfortunately, it makes grim reading for Cyprus. There is no respite – as if Cypriots needed a report to tell them that.