Quartz: Israel is spurning Europe and sending its natural gas bonanza to Egypt

British natural gas company BG has signed a preliminarily deal to export $30 billion in Israeli natural gas to Egypt. The agreement deepens Israel’s business ties with its neighbors while confounding attempts to use the gas to loosen Russia’s hold over Europe.

In papers filed yesterday with the Tel Aviv Stock Exchange, Israeli partners in Leviathan, a supergiant gas field, said the tentative deal signed June 27 would ship 7 billion cubic meters of gas annually to BG’s liquefied natural gas (LNG) processing plant in the Egyptian city of Idku for 15 years. The flow, which would use an undersea pipeline that would be financed by BG, would begin in 2017.

Leviathan, situated in the eastern Mediterranean Sea between Israel and Cyprus, contains the gas equivalent of 3.2 billion barrels of oil.
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