Natural gas consumption at conventional power plants fell by about 350 million cubic feet per day following the Damietta attack, prompting operators to switch to fuel oil to maintain the same electricity output, a source at the Egyptian Natural Gas Holding Company (EGAS) told Al Manassa.
Last week, a fire was reported aboard two vessels at the port of Damietta: the US-owned Energos Winter, a floating liquefied natural gas (LNG) storage and regasification unit that converts LNG back into gas, and GasLog Salem, an LNG carrier. The government later announced that the fire resulted from a drone attack for which no party has claimed responsibility.
The source, who requested anonymity, said conventional power plants currently consume 3.65 billion cubic feet of gas per day, compared with 3.7 billion in August last year.
The petroleum ministry has expanded its leasing of regasification units since 2024 to maintain regular gas flows following repeated disruptions to Israeli gas imports, despite the higher cost of importing LNG compared with pipeline gas.
The attack’s impact on power plants remains limited because they rely mainly on domestic gas, the source explained to Al Manassa. “Power plants obtain 65% of the natural gas they consume from domestic production and about 35% from imports.”
To offset the lost gas supply, the plants nearly tripled their fuel oil consumption to about 30,000 tons per day compared with pre-attack levels, the source explained.
The petroleum ministry will seek to supply more gas to the plants over the coming days to reduce reliance on fuel oil by regasifying supplies at units moored in Jordan.
“The volume slated for regasification in Jordan will amount to nearly 900,000 cubic meters of LNG, yielding around 19.1 billion cubic feet of natural gas that will be pumped to Egypt throughout August,” the source explained.
