Arab Gas Pipeline: Egypt, Jordan, Syria & Lebanon in 2026

The Arab Gas Pipeline (AGP) is a 1,200-kilometre natural gas corridor running from Arish in Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula through Jordan to Syria and Lebanon, built at a cost of approximately $1.2 billion to carry Egyptian gas to the Levant and, eventually, to Europe. It has never operated at anything close to its nameplate capacity of 10.3 billion cubic metres per year. What it has done is expose — repeatedly — how comprehensively geopolitics, sabotage, domestic gas shortages, and regional conflict can undermine even well-capitalised energy infrastructure.

In 2026, the Arab Gas Pipeline is once again a live story. Jordan began pumping gas northward to Syrian power plants in January. Egypt briefly suspended exports in March during the Hormuz crisis before resuming. A separate segment in northern Syria reopened in August 2025, now carrying Azerbaijani gas south from Turkey. Lebanon remains connected in theory and disconnected in practice. The corridor that was conceived as a symbol of Arab energy cooperation has become something more complicated: a patchwork system running gas from multiple origins — including, indirectly, Israeli fields — through infrastructure that was never designed for this configuration.

Construction and Early Design

The AGP was proposed in 2001 and built in four phases. The first — the Arish-to-Aqaba section — was completed in 2003, comprising a 250-kilometre onshore pipeline from Arish to Taba and a short offshore crossing beneath the Gulf of Aqaba into the Jordanian port of Aqaba. Cost: $220 million. Pipe diameter: 36 inches. This section established the physical foundation of the entire corridor.

The second and third phases extended the system northward through Jordan and into Syria. The Jordanian section — Aqaba to Rihab, then Rihab to Jaber at the Syrian border — runs 393 kilometres and was built under a 30-year Build-Own-Operate-Transfer (BOOT) concession by the Jordanian Egyptian Fajr Natural Gas Company, an Egyptian-majority consortium formed in 2003 to finance, build, and operate the Jordanian portion. The European Investment Bank participated in financing alongside a syndicate of 19 commercial banks. The Jordanian section came online in 2005-2007, delivered 18 months ahead of schedule. The Technical Company for Gas Pipeline Operation Services (TGS), established in 2018 by Egyptian FAJR, Jordanian Egyptian FAJR, and GASCO, took over operations and maintenance of the system from March 2019.

The third phase — Jaber to Homs, Syria — began operating in 2008 across the Jaber-Deir Ali-Al Rayan compressor station route. The fourth phase added the Homs-to-Tripoli (Lebanon) branch in 2009, delivering gas to the Deir Ammar power station near Tripoli. A planned Homs-Aleppo extension was never built. An Aleppo-Kilis segment connecting to Turkey was constructed in 2011 by Czech contractor PLYNOSTAV Pardubice Holding but fell idle almost immediately as the Syrian conflict escalated.

The Collapse: Sabotage, Shortage, and the Syrian War

The Arab Gas Pipeline entered commercial operation with Egyptian gas as its sole supply source. That dependency proved fatal to the system’s ambitions. From 2011 onward, the feeder pipeline in northern Sinai — operated by GASCO and connecting Egypt’s gas grid to the Arish origination point — was attacked repeatedly by Bedouin militants, suffering at least 26 insurgent strikes between 2011 and 2014. Each attack caused service interruptions; some caused prolonged shutdowns. By the mid-2010s, Egypt had discontinued gas exports entirely — not only due to the security situation in Sinai, but because Egypt’s domestic gas production had fallen below the level needed to sustain both internal consumption and exports.

Simultaneously, the Syrian civil war rendered the Jaber-Homs and Homs-Tripoli segments inoperable. The Lebanon branch fell idle in 2011. An attack on the pipeline north of Damascus in August 2020 caused widespread power outages across Syria. Between 2013 and 2018, the only AGP section functioning outside Egypt was the Aqaba-Rihab stretch in Jordan — repurposed as a domestic Jordanian gas transmission line, fed not by Egyptian exports but by LNG imported through Jordan’s Aqaba reception terminal. From 2015, Egypt itself began using the reversed pipeline to import LNG through Aqaba, with the Arish-Aqaba section running southward — the opposite of its original design. Reverse flow became commercially operational in 2020.

The Israeli Gas Layer

The return of northward gas flows to the AGP corridor from 2018 onward was made possible in part by an unlikely supply source: Israeli gas. In 2018, Egypt resumed exports through the pipeline, now supplemented by gas from Israel’s offshore fields. In 2020, exports from Israel to Jordan via a new connection in northern Jordan commenced, and separately, Israeli gas began flowing to Egypt through the Arish-Ashkelon submarine pipeline — a 90-kilometre, 26-inch offshore link connecting the AGP system with Israel. By 2025, Chevron and its partners in the Leviathan field had signed an agreement to approximately double exports to Egypt from 0.6 billion cubic feet per day to around 1.25 billion cubic feet per day.

This configuration has created what analysts have described as structural dependence on Israeli supply for a corridor originally designed to carry Egyptian gas to Arab markets. The gas reaching Syria via Jordan in January 2026 — approximately 4 million cubic metres per day through a floating regasification vessel at Aqaba — is in practical terms sourced through a system that relies on Israeli field production feeding Egyptian infrastructure and Jordanian distribution. Syria and Lebanon, neither of which formally recognises Israel, are receiving gas whose origin is partially Israeli by virtue of supply chain architecture. The geopolitical paradox is not incidental — it is now a structural feature of the AGP’s operating reality.

The 2026 Situation: Syria Reconnected, Lebanon Still Waiting

Syria’s new government — following the collapse of the Assad regime in December 2024 — moved quickly to restore gas supply to power its chronically underpowered electricity grid. In March 2024, Qatar, Jordan, and Syria had signed a gas agreement involving regasification at Aqaba. By January 2026, Jordan’s National Electric Power Company had signed a deal with the Syrian Petroleum Company for 4 million cubic metres per day of gas, delivered via the Arab Gas Pipeline through the Jaber-Homs segment, feeding the Deir Ali power plant in southern Syria. The Jaber-Homs segment is therefore partially operational for the first time in over a decade.

In northern Syria, the picture is different again. The Aleppo-Kilis segment — dormant since 2011 — was rehabilitated in 2025 and reconnected to the Turkish grid at Türkoğlu via Kilis. Since August 2025 it has been carrying Azerbaijani gas south into Syria from Turkey’s network — an entirely different supply origin from the Egyptian-Jordanian south. The Southern Gas Corridor’s Azerbaijani production, transiting Turkey, is now entering Syria from the north at the same time Jordanian-relayed LNG enters from the south. Syria is simultaneously a transit state and a destination market for two geopolitically distinct gas corridors.

Egypt’s position shifted sharply in early 2026. In January, Egypt was reported to have begun supplying approximately 2.8 million cubic metres of gas per day to Syria via the AGP. On 1 March 2026, as the Hormuz crisis disrupted regional energy flows and domestic Egyptian demand spiked, Egypt temporarily suspended natural gas exports to Syria and Lebanon through the pipeline to prioritise domestic supply. Jordan-sourced flows to Syria appear to have continued under the bilateral agreement. Lebanon received nothing — the Homs-Tripoli branch remains technically available but has not carried gas since 2011, and technical repair requirements combined with unresolved financing have prevented resumption despite agreements signed in 2021, 2022, and again in 2025.

What the Arab Gas Pipeline Was Supposed to Become

The AGP’s original strategic ambition extended well beyond Lebanon. In 2004, Egypt, Jordan, Syria, and Lebanon agreed to connect the pipeline with Iraq’s gas grid, enabling Iraqi gas to transit Syria toward European markets. In 2006, Egypt, Syria, Jordan, Turkey, Lebanon, and Romania agreed to extend the corridor through Syria to the Turkish border, connecting into the proposed Nabucco pipeline for delivery to Europe. Turkey forecast buying up to 4 billion cubic metres per year from the AGP. That vision — Arab gas through Turkish infrastructure to European consumers — was a forerunner to the energy corridor thinking that would eventually materialise in the Southern Gas Corridor using Azerbaijani rather than Arab gas.

None of it happened. The Syrian war closed the corridor for a decade. The Nabucco pipeline was abandoned. Egypt ran out of gas to export. The Iraq-Turkey pipeline became the only functional overland route carrying hydrocarbons from the Arab world toward Ceyhan and Mediterranean markets — and even that line spent over two years closed before resuming in September 2025. The AGP’s European ambitions are now historical footnotes. What remains is a partially functioning regional corridor carrying modest volumes of gas, from multiple origins, to countries that need it badly enough to set aside the geopolitical contradictions in the supply chain.

Pipeline Specifications

For broader context on the infrastructure carrying hydrocarbons toward European markets, see the top 10 pipeline companies in Europe 2026 — a network that has been reconfiguring around Eastern Mediterranean supply since the loss of Russian pipeline volumes from 2022 onward.