Egypt now pays about $80m for each cargo of liquefied natural gas it imports, roughly double the $40m it paid before the regional war involving Iran, Petroleum and Mineral Resources Minister Karim Badawi said in remarks reported on 31 August by Ahram Online.
Badawi attributed the jump to two pressures arriving at once: higher natural gas prices, and rising shipping and insurance costs on the tankers that carry the fuel, according to CairoScene. Egypt buys those cargoes to close the gap between what it produces and what it burns, and that gap widened through the summer.
Gas consumption rose nearly 12% across July and August to around 7.28 billion cubic feet a day, against roughly 6.45 billion cubic feet a day over the October to March period, Ahram Online reported. Domestic production stood at about 3.7 billion cubic feet a day in mid-2026 and is expected to reach around 4.2 billion cubic feet a day during the current fiscal year, the minister said. By EgyptPulse's calculation, the two figures he gave for peak summer demand and current output sit roughly 3.6 billion cubic feet a day apart, and imported cargoes are what fills that space.
The doubling is a price effect rather than a volume one: the same cargo, bought at twice the money. Badawi did not give a figure for how many cargoes Egypt is buying in a month, and no revised total for the summer's import spending appears in the published accounts of his remarks. He said Egypt had nevertheless secured the domestic market's needs for petroleum products and natural gas despite the higher consumption.
The vessel that is not working
The other half of the squeeze is moored at Damietta. The Energos Winter, Egypt's only floating storage and regasification unit on the Mediterranean coast, was damaged in a drone attack in July and has been out of service since. It had been delivering about 450 million cubic feet a day into the Egyptian gas grid, according to Enterprise.
Egypt is weighing two ways to bring it back. State-owned Petrojet would carry out the repair locally in about six weeks; sending the vessel to Turkey would take roughly a month, Enterprise reported. Neither option can begin until the roughly 70,000 cubic metres of LNG still onboard is offloaded, either at Ain Sokhna or at Damietta itself.
Storage is not the bottleneck. Damietta's onshore tanks held around 270,000 cubic metres against a capacity of 300,000 cubic metres, close to 90% full, after receiving roughly 150,000 cubic metres in August, according to the same report. That gas cannot reach households or power stations without a working regasification unit to turn it back into vapour.
The Petroleum Ministry's stated position is that none of this has reached consumers.
The damaged vessel did not impact Egypt's gas market. — Karim Badawi, Egypt's Minister of Petroleum, as reported by Asharq Al-Awsat
Egypt expects the vessel to resume operations in the fourth quarter of the year, Asharq Al-Awsat reported.
The improvised replacement
Covering 450 million cubic feet a day without the Energos Winter has meant reaching across borders. Enterprise lists the arrangements now in place or under study:
- A Damietta-bound LNG cargo redirected to Jordan's Aqaba port.
- Higher pipeline imports from Israel in the period after the strike.
- Up to 450 million cubic feet a day drawn from the Excelerate Acadia, a floating unit at Aqaba, through the Arab Gas Pipeline.
- A 150,000-cubic-metre floating storage unit under study for deployment at Ain Sokhna in September, at an estimated $75,000 a day, or roughly $2.25m a month.
The Excelerate Acadia is rated to supply up to the same 450 million cubic feet a day the Energos Winter was contributing, but it delivers through the Arab Gas Pipeline from Jordan rather than into the Mediterranean coast grid directly. Each of these arrangements is a cost or a dependency that did not exist while the Damietta vessel was running, and two of them route a share of Egypt's supply through Jordanian and Israeli infrastructure.
What the doubling sits inside
LNG accounted for nearly 72% of Egypt's gas imports in the first quarter of 2026, against virtually none in 2023, Enterprise reported. The country's total gas import bill for the 2026/27 fiscal year is projected at $10.7bn. That is the frame the $80m cargo price sits inside: a bill large enough that a doubling in unit cost is a budget question rather than a procurement detail.
The sector carrying that bill only recently settled its debts. Egypt cleared $6.1bn in arrears owed to foreign oil and gas partners in June, Ahram Online reported, and Badawi said production would otherwise have declined to 2.2 billion cubic feet a day. Refinery utilisation has since risen above 80%, from 67% previously, and the ministry set annual domestic consumption targets of 11.84 billion litres of petrol, 17.77 billion litres of diesel and 6.94 million tonnes of fuel oil.
The supply that arrives later
Badawi pointed to new domestic production as the medium-term answer. Eni's Denise field in the Mediterranean holds an estimated 2 trillion cubic feet of gas, and the minister said Eni had agreed to fast-track production to late 2027, according to Asharq Al-Awsat. Egypt has also resumed work on the Narges field, undeveloped since 2022. BP's Fayoum-4 well has come online producing 80 million cubic feet a day, and new wells at Meleiha in the Western Desert are due to start in late September alongside facilities delayed by the arrears.
None of that arrives in time for the season that has already been paid for. Three things have not been made public: which repair option Egypt has chosen, what either would cost, and how much the redirected cargoes, the additional pipeline gas and a possible second floating unit add to the $10.7bn already projected for this fiscal year.
