avec une vidéo (que je ne retrouve pas ailleurs) montrant l’arrivée d’un drone et sa percussion contre un tanker (gazier), pratiquement sans charge explosive…
▻https://x.com/shanaka86/status/2082749667364970803
Eni and TotalEnergies approved a new Cypriot gas route into Europe through Damietta on Tuesday. On Wednesday a suspected drone hit the American-owned floating gas terminal moored in that port. The target was not the pipeline and not the export plant. It was the backup.
Both halves are on the record. Eni and TotalEnergies each published the decision on 28th July. Cypriot gas runs by subsea pipeline into Egypt, is processed through the Zohr facilities, liquefied at Damietta and shipped to Europe from 2028. Plateau output of 500 million cubic feet a day, roughly 2.8 million tonnes of LNG a year. TotalEnergies chief executive Patrick Pouyanné called it a new Mediterranean gas route contributing to Europe’s energy security by diversifying supply.
Damietta’s liquefaction plant sat idle from 2013 to 2021 and has run only intermittently since. Cronos gas restarts it.
28 hours after the announcement the Energos Winter was on fire.
Ambrey and Vanguard assessed a projectile or drone striking its starboard side shortly after 2pm GMT. Flames spread to the GasLog Salem alongside, near its number two forward cargo tanks. Egyptian crews put both out and moved the ships offshore. All 25 crew were safe. Egypt’s petroleum ministry confirmed a fire and not a cause. No state and no group has claimed it. Trump said America would respond very hard and that it was his country’s turn to hit back, while saying he had been briefed without naming anyone.
Which asset burned changes the meaning. Energos Winter is not the export plant. It is a 138,250 cubic metre floating storage and regasification unit on a five-year charter to Egypt’s state gas company, and its job is taking imported LNG, turning it back into gas and feeding Egypt’s national grid.
Damietta now holds two things at one address. Egypt’s import lifeline, and Europe’s newest export route.
Concentration is what a floating terminal is for. After 2022, Germany, Italy and Egypt reached for them because a floating unit arrives in months while a built one takes years. Speed carried a cost. Once moored, an FSRU stacks storage, regasification, grid connection, berth and a receiving carrier into one target that cannot move.
Damietta also sits outside the waters underwriters currently list for this war, which cover the Gulf, the Gulf of Oman, the Indian Ocean, the Gulf of Aden and the southern Red Sea. War insurance is priced by geography. If assets can be selected by their function in a network instead of their position in a strait, a listed area stops being the right instrument.
Four days earlier, Iran said a Ukrainian strike on one of its vessels in the Caspian killed a sailor and could not go unanswered. Kyiv said it hit ships carrying Iran-linked military cargo. That is a sequence. It is not attribution and should not be treated as one until evidence arrives.
The thesis holds either way. If the strike was hostile, a war has moved from chokepoints to the emergency infrastructure built after the last crisis. If investigators find another cause, the vulnerability is still sitting in plain view.
This fails if a non-hostile cause is established, nothing comparable outside the listed zones is struck before 30th September, and underwriters leave Mediterranean floating-terminal terms unchanged.
The next energy war will not go after the route. It will go after the thing built to survive losing the route.
