The Egyptian authorities are going to stop gas imports for a period of three to five years after the discovery of one of the world's largest deposits of natural gas in Egyptian territorial waters in the Mediterranean Sea, the official spokesman of the Egyptian Ministry of Petroleum and Mineral Resources, Hamdi Abdel Aziz, said.
He recalled that the deposit found by the Italian company Eni is the most extensive since 1967: the volume of accessible gas reserves is about 30 trillion cubic feet.
"It is important that in this case we don't need to import gas from other countries," RIA Novosti cited Abdel Aziz as saying.
According to experts, the gas reserves amount to 849.5 billion cubic meters. Eni noted that it was "the largest gas discovery ever made in Egypt and in the Mediterranean Sea."
An assistant professor of government regulation of the economy, the deputy head of the department of state regulation of the economy on educational work of the Institute of Public Administration and Management (IGSU) RANHiGS, Ivan Kapitonov, told Vestnik Kavkaza that in the short term the discovery will certainly lower the price of gas, but we cannot speak about a long-term impact of the detection of even such serious gas reserves.
"The discovery of the deposit does not mean economically justified, feasible production in this field. The prospected deposit requires further analysis, and market conditions are quickly changing now. It is premature to talk about whether there will be production and how it will affect the physical gas market. So it's hard to say about the economic impact of the discovery of the deposit," the expert said.
"Most likely, it will now be played out in the gas market. This will happen today or tomorrow. Then the market will come back - just like Iraq, then Iran, within just two weeks," Ivan Kapitonov noted.
Associate Professor of the department of stock markets and financial engineering of the Faculty of Finance and Banking (FFBD) of RANHiGS, Sergei Hestanov, in an interview with a correspondent of Vestnik Kavkaza noted that a reliable estimate of field reserves is impossible until its commercial production is started.
"Any geological assessments are not very reliable before the start of commercial operations. History knows many precedents when deposits, which seemed very rich, showed quite weak results during commercial operation," he said.
"Even in the best case it will be quite a while before the field will feed into industrial supplies. We are talking about five years, and that is quite a reasonable and even optimistic estimate," Hestanov said.
The expert stressed that the opening of the field will still affect gas prices due to emotional factors.
