State bodies, NGOs up in arms over oil company’s plan to move into fiber optics

The Europe Asia Pipeline Company, which manages a network of crude oil pipelines between Ashkelon on the southern Mediterranean coast and Eilat on the Red Sea, is waging a new legal and environmental battle — this time to go into the fiber optics business.

The state company wants to lay six polyethylene fiber-optic sleeves alongside its oil pipes — two containing fibers to gather real-time information about threats to the pipeline infrastructure, and an additional four to be rented to security organizations or commercially to other companies.

It says it wants to use its terrestrial infrastructure in the Arava and Negev deserts to create an international communications bridge between Europe, Asia, and the Arab world, thereby strengthening Israel’s status as a regional communications center.

Opposing the project are the Environmental Protection Ministry, the Israel Nature and Parks Authority, two regional authorities, the Society for the Protection of Nature in Israel, and Keshet, an NGO focused on Mitzpe Ramon and the Negev Highlands in southern Israel.

They contend that the EAPC’s mandate is strictly limited to the “transport and storage of oil” and that digging new infrastructure for telecommunications — even for internal monitoring — exceeds that mandate.

Sources speculated that the real reason the EAPC wants to move into communications is to ensure its continued existence once oil goes out of fashion.

They also said no information has been provided on the underground communication infrastructure, control-and-command buildings, and technical facilities required to operate the fiber-optic lines.

In an appeal to the Deputy Attorney General (Civil) at the Justice Ministry last month, lawyers for the Nature and Parks Authority pointed out that the EAPC was relying on a 2021 plan known as EAPC 1000. This, they said, was not a conventional plan that had passed all the necessary stages, but a map approved via a licensing procedure with zero public transparency or environmental review. They charged that using the plan to bypass environmental scrutiny for a 260-kilometer-long (160-mile) trench was a “cynical exploitation” of the law.

They also said fiber-optic lines would likely outlive the oil pipelines, which would, “without any justification,” prolong the disturbance of the protected areas and open spaces, while also imposing restrictions on farms, communities, and their development reserves.

They cited disastrous oil leaks from EAPC pipelines in the Zin Valley in 2011 and in Evrona in 2014 as proof that any new digging along the 123-kilometer (76-mile) stretches that cross nature reserves, craters, forests, and other areas of high ecological and scenic value would require very careful planning and review.

The EAPC has rejected the Environmental Protection Ministry’s instructions for a broad environmental impact survey, which includes examining alternatives and justifying why fiber optics planned along Highway 90 cannot be used for operational purposes instead.

The EAPC argues that it does not need planning permission for the two operational sleeves and will dig them in anyway. Adding four commercial sleeves will have a negligible environmental impact if the trench is already dug, it says.

A company source told The Times of Israel that the fiber optics would improve environmental monitoring. Each sleeve has a diameter of just 50 millimeters (two inches), he added, and would be buried only 1.20 meters (four feet) deep.

The fibers have to be just four to five meters (13 to 16 feet) from the pipelines for monitoring to be effective, he went on, so using lines along Route 90, many kilometers away, was irrelevant.

The EAPC has submitted its own environmental impact survey, claiming that the chairman of the southern district planning committee specified its contents.

“The Environmental Protection Ministry opposes the plan because it opposes the existence of the EAPC,” the company source said. “The committee chairman went over the heads of the Environmental Protection Ministry and told us what to include in the impact survey.” He said he had the documentation to prove it.

On Sunday, participants at a district planning committee meeting in Beersheba spent most of their time discussing the environmental survey issue.

Shay Tachnai, who was at that meeting and is in charge of the Society for the Protection of Nature in Israel’s southern district, said that contrary to the source’s claim, the EAPC explained that the preparation of its own survey was based on a misunderstanding.

According to Tachnai, the committee chairman asked the district planning committee and the ministry to review EAPC documents related to the survey and said that a further closed meeting of committee members, without company representatives, would be convened once that review is complete.