Built to export LNG from the Middle East, the war on Iran has caused the cessation of exports and made Egypt in need of LNG from the US.
The illegal war on Iran by the US-Israel in February 2026 has pushed many Egyptians into poverty, with increasing food insecurity.
The Houthis launched a drone attack to hit a US LNG tanker which caused a sufficient fire for it to need to be pulled by tugs 13 miles from the port into a part of the Mediterranean away from shipping lanes. If it had ignited the gas tanks it would have blown up like an atom bomb and caused the incineration of the port plus thousands of Egyptians living in the region
Egypt had previously been an LNG exporter — Damietta hosted one of the Arabic-speaking world’s first LNG export terminals — but declining domestic gas production turned the country into a net importer.
The Damietta Alliance Container Terminal has officially started commercial operations after receiving its first vessel call from the Essen Express, a 13,117-TEU container ship operated by Hapag-Lloyd.
The launch marks the opening of a new Mediterranean–North Africa transshipment hub built with more than $600 million in investment. The terminal is designed primarily to handle transshipment cargo and has an annual capacity of up to 3.3 million TEU.
According to the developers, about 80% of the terminal’s throughput is expected to come from transshipment operations, while the remaining 20% will support import and export flows serving Damietta, Cairo and nearby regional markets including the Levant and the Black Sea region.
The facility spans about 93 hectares and includes a 1,670-metre quay with a depth of 18 metres. Equipment at the terminal includes 12 fully electric ship-to-shore cranes with 25-row outreach and 40 hybrid rubber-tyred gantry cranes. The site also features rail infrastructure with six train lanes, two of which are operational at launch.
The Eastern Mediterranean’s Fragile Energy Architecture and What One Drone Revealed
Energy infrastructure has always been the silent variable in geopolitical risk modelling. Markets price crude oil, natural gas futures, and shipping rates against a baseline assumption that the physical systems moving these commodities remain largely intact. That assumption is increasingly difficult to defend along the Eastern Mediterranean corridor, where a single drone strike on July 29, 2026 exposed the structural fragility sitting beneath Europe’s post-Russia gas diversification strategy.
The drone strike on Egypt’s Damietta port was not simply a regional security incident. It was a stress test applied to one of the most consequential energy chokepoints in the world at a moment when that chokepoint was already operating under historically elevated load.
Retired, living in the Scottish Borders after living most of my life in cities in England. I can now indulge my interest in all aspects of living close to nature in a wild landscape. I live on what was once the Iapetus Ocean which took millions of years to travel from the Southern Hemisphere to here in the Northern Hemisphere. That set me thinking and questioning and seeking answers.
In 1998 I co-wrote Millennium Countdown (US)/ A Business Guide to the Year 2000 (UK) see https://www.abebooks.co.uk/products/isbn/9780749427917
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