If there is one country in the world that does not need for gas, it is Qatar. The small Persian Gulf emirate may rank third in proven gas reserves after Russia and Iran, but with only 360,000 Qatari citizens, the wealth each derives from Qatar’s accident of geography is immense. Even with Qatar’s enormous energy footprint, its reserves can power the country for more than 600 years.
Qatar has spread its gas income widely. The Qatar Investment Authority, the country’s sovereign wealth fund, is worth more than a half-trillion dollars. That does not account for money the tiny gas giant uses to subsidize media, spreads around to charities and universities, or covertly channels to support Islamist causes and perhaps even U.S.-designated terror groups. In 2022, Qatari income mandated investment and spending of more than $80,000 per minute.
The last thing Qatar needs is more gas, nor is the difficulty and investment in untapped gas fields likely to match profits that investing those funds elsewhere could garner.
Hence, Qatar’s gas field investment strategy in the Eastern Mediterranean merits attention. In January 2023, Qatar replaced a Russian company exploring for gas in one of Lebanon’s offshore fields. Last month, Qatar bought a 23 percent stake in an offshore Egyptian bloc from Chevron. Nor was Egypt’s offshore field alone as the target of Qatari investment. In the coming year, Qatar Energy is working with ExxonMobil to drill two new wells off the coast of Cyprus.
Qatari gas development enables the Qatari government to insert ships, men, and equipment into a sensitive region under cover of business.
While Qatar distributes gas internationally and invests in a gas plant in Texas, the rapid expansion into the Eastern Mediterranean gas fields goes beyond supply and is at sharp dissonance with previous Qatari strategy. Nor does the gas market justify Qatar’s pivot to the Eastern Mediterranean. Instead, Qatar’s establishment of a significant presence in the Eastern Mediterranean suggests a geostrategic desire to establish a presence in an increasingly strategic region. Qatari gas development enables the Qatari government to insert ships, men, and equipment into a sensitive region under cover of business. Just as Hamas embezzled international funds and assistance to build Hamas’s multibillion-dollar underground webs of tunnels, regional terror groups could supply manpower or become recipients of sophisticated computers and machinery purchased under cover of gas development.
Qatar’s Eastern Mediterranean strategy also may involve Turkey. Turkey’s government long has promoted pipeline networks that would violate Cypriot territorial waters and cut off Israeli ambitions for pipeline connections to Greece and Cyprus. In time of conflict or tension, Qatar will be better able to spy on Israel and disrupt its actions. Its partnerships with major energy companies also will enable it to lobby against Israel in Congress indirectly, without having to deal with the growing stigma associated with Qatar itself.
Qatar is more diplomatic and polished than Turkey, but both countries promote the same Islamist agenda. Too often, they take advantage of the compartmentalization of U.S. bureaucracy and those of its allies, but seldom do they act randomly, outside the pursuit of a broader strategy. For Egypt and Cyprus especially to advance Qatar’s Eastern Mediterranean ambitions seems at best an own-goal and at worst the harbinger that the security challenges in the region will not be limited to land.
