The visit to Tel Aviv on May 26 by Turkish Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu and the news that Turkey and Israel are planning to re-establish formal diplomatic and economic relations has again raised the prospect that the two East Mediterranean states might also decide to cooperate to transit Israel's sizeable gas reserves to Turkey and on to Europe.

First mooted over a decade ago following the discovery of Israel's 620 billion cubic meter Leviathan gas field, plans to pipe Israeli gas to Turkey were sharply dropped following successive disputes between Ankara and Tel Aviv over Israel's treatment of its Palestinian Arab population. 

The past few years have seen Israel looking both at developing a terminal to export gas as LNG, and an ambitious project for a pipeline linking Israel with Cyprus and Greece, options which carry price tags of up to $6 billion, have both been discarded as uneconomic.

Now with the Russian invasion of Ukraine resulting in Moscow starting to turn off the gas taps to Europe and the EU looking to replace as much as a third of the 155 billion cubic meters of Russian gas it imports, from new sources in the Caspian and Mediterranean, interest in Turkey as a potential route to carry Israeli gas to Europe has suddenly been reignited.