The energy competition in the Eastern Mediterranean between economic dimension and political implications: global consequences and spill-over effects for Europe

In recent years, the Eastern Mediterranean has seen increasing attention from both economic operators and several states, interested in the exploitation of its energy resources. The worsening of political-military tensions, with the growing rivalry between Greece and Turkey, adds another point of interest. In the same sense, the increased presence in the Mediterranean of Russia and China, both committed -- albeit for different reasons -- to raising their regional profile. For some time now, around the natural gas of the eastern Mediterranean, there have been unprecedented syntheses in many aspects, and the energy field could turn out to be, in the future, an unexpected place of collaboration between countries that, in other spheres, are often different stakeholders. Both the European Union and several Member States are looking carefully at these developments, both from the point of view of differentiation of supply lines and in the light of the difficulties that their traditional suppliers are experiencing. To all this is added the interest of economic operators, who see the region as a possible new area of activity, albeit with all the reservations linked to the problematic political framework. The impact of COVID-19 on the US unconventional sector (which, until recently, has been the real game-changer of an increasingly rigid energy market) also relaunches the possible role of the Eastern Mediterranean, also in the light of the infrastructure projects that intersect the region. These different dimensions contribute to defining a tangle of political and economic interests, potentially able to respond to the EU's ambitions to reduce the weight of the Russian-Norwegian duopoly on which today most supplies depend, both in terms of volume and value. At the same time, they raise several questions about the possibility of the different regional actors to engage in forms of collaboration both for the exploitation of existing resources and for their commercialisation.