Cyprus Gas
Benchmarks
Four measures of how this play actually behaves — how long a discovery waits for a decision, how the strike rate changed, how often anyone drills at all, and how concentrated the resource is. Nobody publishes these, so we compute them.
Every number here is derived from the dataset behind this site rather than quoted from a release. Each one carries the method it was computed with and the rows it was computed from, so you can redo the arithmetic instead of taking our word for it.
The wait between finding gas off Cyprus and committing the money to produce it has collapsed — from 16 years for Aphrodite to 5 for Cronos.
Time from discovery to FID has fallen from 16 years to 5
Aphrodite was found in 2011 and is still waiting on a final investment decision. Cronos, found in 2022, expects one in 2027. The gap between those two numbers is the clearest measure of how much the province has de-risked.
Method. Discovery year comes from the field record; the FID and start-up years come from the milestones tracker, matched to the field the milestone links to. Where an operator names a window rather than a year, the tracker's midpoint is used — so “Late 2026 – 2027” for Aphrodite counts as 2027. Dark bar: discovery to FID. Pale bar: on to first gas. Fields with no dated FID are excluded.
Cyprus stopped drilling dry holes as it moved into deeper water
Split the exploration record at the last well that came back dry — Delphyne-1, spudded 2018-12 — and the two halves look nothing alike. The wells got roughly 315 m deeper and the misses stopped.
Method. Exploration wells only — appraisal wells re-drill a field already found and would inflate the rate. The boundary is not a chosen date: it is the spud date of the last dry hole on record. Caveat. This is a correlation across 11 wells, not a causal claim. The later wells also had the benefit of everything the earlier ones learned, and a sample this small can move on one result.
The basin drills in bursts — 4 years since 2011 saw no well at all
Nothing was spudded in 2012, 2016, 2020, 2024. Rigs of this class are booked years ahead and move between basins, so Cypriot activity arrives in campaigns rather than at a steady rate — which is why a quiet year says less about the province than it appears to.
Method. Counted by spud date across all 15 wells on record, exploration and appraisal together, because a rig year is a rig year regardless of what it was drilling. The longest gap between discoveries is separate and longer: 6 years, 2011 to 2017.
Two fields account for around two fifths of the national headline
The Republic quotes 17–18 tcf across its commercial fields. ExxonMobil's single figure for Glaucus + Pegasus is 7–9 tcf — between 39% and 53% of it, from one block.
Glaucus + Pegasus sit in Block 10 and are reported as one number, so the concentration is a property of the reporting as much as of the geology.
Method and caveat. This is a ratio of two published figures in different reporting categories — a combined hub estimate over the government's aggregate — not a physical fraction of the resource. Read it as “how much of the number people quote is attributable to one block”, and see why the headline is not a sum.
Use these numbers
Free under CC BY 4.0, with the method attached so an editor can check them. The same benchmarks are available as JSON, recomputed on every request from the underlying records.
Updated July 2026 · Sources: Cyprus MECI, operator disclosures