EU to fund planning of pipeline from Leviathan to Europe

The European Union (EU) will fund the detailed planning for laying a natural gas pipeline from Israel's Leviathan offshore gas reservoir to Europe. On January 25, the European Commission in Brussels published a list of its priority clean energy projects for 2018 that will receive €873 million in aggregate funding.

The project, called EastMed, is for an undersea pipeline from Leviathan through Cypriot waters to Crete and Italy. The EU has allocated €34.5 million to complete planning, so that a final decision can be made about investing in the project in 2019.

This ambitious project, however, is still far from implementation. The engineering difficulty in this complex infrastructure project lies in its undersea route, which reaches a depth of 3.3 kilometers, and the volcanic activity on the sea bottom between Cyprus and Greece. Such activity is liable to cause damage to the pipeline that will be very hard to repair.

Find the original article produced by Globes here.