An oil and gas rush is on in the eastern Mediterranean, and while resource-poor Lebanon may be late to the race, government officials are working feverishly to make sure this country wastes no more time in starting drilling.

Egypt was the first eastern Mediterranean country in the region to begin extraction, back in 1910, when it was under British rule. More recently, in 2000, Palestinians found a gas field off the coast of Gaza, but are prevented from bringing the resources ashore by Israel, which itself has made some of the biggest finds recently. In 2009, it found the Tamer gas field, 60 miles offshore from Haifa and containing some 8.4 trillion cubic feet of gas.

The game heated up in October 2010 when Israel began drilling in the Leviathan natural gas field, 135 kilometers offshore and estimated to be of considerable size — even bigger than the Tamar field. Israel says it could contain up to 16 trillion cubic feet of natural gas, enough to secure its hydrocarbon supply for a century.

All this activity has not gone unnoticed in Lebanon. On the back of seismic studies carried out over the past few years, Lebanon is pretty confident it has gas, and perhaps oil, off its coast. It began moves to initiate resource exploration in its waters in 2000, but the project was delayed by political paralysis and domestic and regional conflicts. However, recent hydrocarbon discoveries south of its border in Israel has reinvigorated energy lobbies in the country.

Besides the business interests that drive the push to drill, Lebanon has some other very compelling reasons to kick-start exploration — it still struggles to provide for the basic energy needs of its people. The country's aging power generation infrastructure is unable to match its growing demand for energy. Right now, the government provides just 60% of the public's electricity needs. As a result, Beirut typically sees three to six hours of outages of government-supplied electricity a day. And up in mountain villages like Aley, 10 to 12 hours of power outage is the norm. These days, village residents look elsewhere than to the government for power.

The conviction is rapidly growing in government circles that the solution — the silver bullet for Lebanon's energy woes — lies off its coast. Lebanon's power plants run on diesel and oil. Running them on natural gas would stand to benefit this cash-strapped country.

Lebanon currently imports natural gas from Egypt to power half of one of its power plants, and Minister for Energy and Water Gebran Bassil says it is saving the country substantial money. "If it's a full power plant, we're talking about $250 million." If the supply were domestic, the saving would be even greater.

Analysts say that if Lebanon finds gas fields even close in size to those being found by Israel, it could do much more than solve the country's energy shortage. Exportation could greatly reduce the country's suffocating public debt, currently at $50 billion.

The prospects being painted are indeed rosy, but the realization of these plans — the actual practice of drilling in such geopolitically sensitive territory — is less than promising. Lebanon and Israel are enemy states, technically at war. Their maritime borders are not bilaterally defined and many of the hydrocarbon resources are thought to lie in and around waters that may be disputed in the future.

Already, Lebanese politicians and advisors have lashed out at Israel, warning it and its contracted energy companies not to drill close to Lebanese waters, or engage in practices, like horizontal drilling, that would amount to resource theft.

Sabre-rattling aside, Minister Bassil and the government finally passed a law this year to enable drilling. It says it will start auctioning off drilling licenses in early 2012, not a minute too soon for energy-starved Lebanese.

What do you think? Will the resource race add fuel to the fire in this already volatile region? Is resource extraction feasible in such an environment, and should countries depend on such resources when extraction can be so easily disturbed by geopolitics or violence?

Listen to Don Duncan's story "Keeping the Lights on," about the race for power off Lebanon's coast.