Israel has entered a natural gas export deal with Egypt and the European Union (EU) as Europe scrambles to find alternative energy suppliers to replace Russia amid the ongoing conflict in Ukraine and its gas-for-rubles scheme.

The deal was signed on Wednesday during a regional summit in Cairo and will see natural gas from Israel being liquefied at Egyptian processing plants and then exported to Europe. 

“With this agreement we will work on the stable delivery of natural gas to the EU from the East Med region,” European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen tweeted on Wednesday.

Tarek El-Molla, Egypt’s petroleum minister, asserted that the agreement would see further alliances from the countries in the East Mediterranean Gas Forum. These member-states include Jordan, Israel, Cyprus, Greece, Egypt, Palestine, France and Italy.

In the past year, The EU imported about 40 per cent of its gas from Moscow. The bloc noted that energy imports represented 62 per cent of its total imports from Russia, and had cost €99 billion. 

The deal with Israel and Egypt underscores the EU’s commitment to sever its dependence on Russian energy imports. 

At the start of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the bloc’s Gas Coordination Group assessed its biggest threat to the security of gas supply would come from the failure to restock gas storage facilities.  As such, the group proposed that EU countries guarantee that the storage infrastructures in their territories are filled up to at least 90 per cent of their capacity by November 1 each year, and to 80 per cent this year.

Countries like Denmark and the Netherlands have faced being cut off from Moscow’s gas supply chain as they’ve refused to purchase their oil in Russian currency. Russia cut off gas exports to Finland from May 21. The Russian company earlier cut off Poland’s PGNiG and Bulgaria’s Bulgargaz over their refusal to deal in rubles.