BRUSSELS — EU ministers want to build out domestic gas sources in Greece, Cyprus, the Baltic states and Romania as the Iran war threatens long-running energy supply disruptions, a top official said Wednesday.
“We discussed how the development of indigenous gas resources such as the Neptune Deep project in Romania, offshore explorations in Greece and Cyprus, and discoveries in the Polish-Baltic coast can strategically complement our security and diversification goals,” Michael Damianos, the minister of energy for Cyprus, which holds the EU’s rotating presidency, told reporters at a summit of energy officials in Nicosia.
He emphasized that such projects must be “assessed through the lens of our climate and clean energy goals.”
The EU has been under increasing pressure to ramp up its production of fossil fuels amid overlapping U.S. and Iranian blockades of the Strait of Hormuz, the vital waterway through which a fifth of world oil and liquefied natural gas travels. ACER, an EU energy regulatory agency, warned Wednesday that 27 billion cubic meters of global gas supply could be lost if the strait stays closed for the rest of the year. That’s about a tenth of EU annual demand.
