Jordan announced Saturday that Egypt will stop providing the Arab kingdom with gas after a gas pipeline exploded in the northern Sinai desert, the state-run Petra news agency reported.
"The explosion in the pipeline in Al Arish area stopped the supply of Egyptian gas to the Kingdom. We were forced to resort to using heavy fuel and diesel to generate power," Ghaleb Maabreh, director general of Jordanian National Electric Power Company ( NEPCO), said Saturday, DPA reported.
It is expected that Jordan will stop receiving Egyptian gas for one week until the targeted pipelines are repaired, Maabreh said. The heavy fuel and diesel reserve to generate power is sufficient for three weeks in the country, he added.
The daily cost of generating power based on heavy fuel and diesel is estimated at about three million Jordanian dinars (about 4.5 million U.S. dollars).
Over the past three years, about 80 percent of power generated in the Kingdom relied on the Egyptian gas.
In 2010, Jordan imported about 239 million cubic meters of gas from Egypt.