The fear is that the political uprising in Egypt risks rolling into the wider Middle East, upsetting the major oil-producing nations.
Egypt is on its way towards becoming a significant hydrocarbon centre itself, after big discoveries made in the Nile Delta last summer.
But it is not just new oil drilling that has stopped. Renewable energy is also being disrupted.
Cairo was meant to launch a tender for 500MW of new wind-power plants around the Gulf of Suez last month.
