Cairo — At the end of January, the Gaslog Glasgow departed from the liquefied natural gas (LNG) plant in Damietta, Egypt, and set course for the Gate Terminal in Rotterdam, the only LNG import facility in the Netherlands. With a capacity of 174,000 cubic meters, this was the first such shipment ever from Egypt to the Netherlands, which operates as a hub for the supply of this type of natural gas in the strategic northwest Europe.

The shipment symbolically opened the door to a new market at a particularly good time for Egyptian LNG exports. Last year, fueled by an unusually favorable context, Egypt recorded a 10-year high in LNG sales, a flow that local authorities hope to maintain at least in the short term as the country moves to position itself as a regional hub for the trade and distribution of natural gas and to become a major player in the LNG market.

“[The shipment] was significant for two reasons: the first one, of course, because it’s the first ever; and the second one is that I found it strange that Egypt was not on their side if the Dutch needed to have LNG,” Cyril Widdershoven, a global energy market expert and founder of Verocy, a risk consultancy in the Netherlands, told Al-Monitor.

Egypt’s road to LNG exports has not been an easy one. For much of the last decade, and especially in the years following the tumultuous 2011, the country has depended heavily on gas imports, to the extent that in 2016 it had to spend some $3 billion to this end. The situation started to reverse rapidly in 2018 after the discovery of new major gas fields, the introduction of far-reaching reforms in the sector, the payment of most dues accumulated to foreign partners and the arrival of extensive foreign direct investments in the industry.