All “important services” are down after a gas scarcity shut down the nation’s final energy plant
Lebanon’s final operational energy plant has run out of gas, plunging the nation into a complete blackout. EDL, the Lebanese state vitality firm, mentioned that the facility reduce will have an effect on airports, water provides, and prisons.
The oil-fired Zahrani energy plant exhausted its gas provides and shut down on Saturday afternoon, “leading to a complete energy outage throughout all Lebanese territories,” Electricite du Liban (EDL) mentioned in an announcement.
The outage will have an effect on “important services such because the airport, port, water pumps, sewage programs, and prisons,” the corporate continued, including that energy will step by step be restored “as soon as gas oil is secured.”
Energy shortages have plagued Lebanon for many years, with the nation’s post-2019 financial disaster worsening the scenario. EDL usually gives lower than 5 hours of electrical energy per day, with Lebanese properties and companies counting on diesel or petrol turbines to make up the shortfall.
Lebanon has few pure sources, and imports all the oil utilized in services just like the Zahrani plant. In 2021, Iraq provided Beirut 1,000,000 tonnes of heavy gas oil per 12 months in change for companies, together with well being care, for Iraqi residents. Nevertheless, the Iraqi oil is just too heavy to be used in Lebanese energy crops, forcing Lebanon to commerce it for lighter gasoline oil on worldwide markets at disadvantageous charges.
The Zahrani plant was Lebanon’s sole operational energy facility since one other oil-fired plant in Deir Ammar shut down final month. Whereas the nation has 5 hydroelectric crops, all are past their service life and are both shut down or producing a fraction of their earlier output.
The blackout got here hours after an Israeli airstrike killed ten individuals in Wadi Al-Kfour in southern Lebanon. Hezbollah militants responded to the strike by firing greater than 50 rockets into northern Israel, the Lebanese paramilitary group mentioned in an announcement. Israel and Hezbollah have traded hearth ever since Israel’s navy marketing campaign in Gaza started ten months in the past, though tensions not too long ago reached boiling level after Israel assassinated the group’s high navy commander in Beirut final month.
Israeli International Minister Israel Katz warned final month that “an all-out warfare” with Hezbollah was more and more seemingly, whereas Hezbollah chief Hassan Nasrallah cautioned Israel to count on “open battle on all fronts.”
Ought to Israel go to warfare with Hezbollah, it might seemingly goal Lebanon’s energy grid. Throughout Israel’s 2006 invasion of southern Lebanon, an Israeli strike on oil storage tanks on the Jiyeh energy station took the plant offline and triggered as much as 30,000 tons of oil to leak into the Mediterranean, polluting the ocean as far-off as Cyprus, Türkiye, and Greece.
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