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20 January 2011

New gas find offshore Israel

Funny the things that slip by.

Over Christmas the Globe and Mail ran a story on new oil and natural gas finds in Israel.  The twenty trillion cubic feet of natural gas in one set of offshore finds will reshape the Middle East and more energy finds could reshape global energy supplies.

Estimated to contain 16 trillion cubic feet of gas – equivalent to more than a quarter of Canada’s proven reserves and enough to meet Israel’s domestic demand for 100 years – the Leviathan field is believed to be the largest such deep-water gas discovery in a decade.

The find actually dates from  June 2010 as a story in the Jerusalem Post shows.

In January 2009, the discovery of the natural-gas field 90 kilometers offshore from Haifa, known as Tamar, in which Noble Energy has a 36% working interest, was made by the US-Israel consortium including the Delek Group, through its subsidiaries Delek Drilling and Avner Oil Exploration, Isramco Negev 2, Dor Gas Exploration. Tamar is the largest exploration discovery in Noble Energy’s history, which last year also discovered a natural-gas field at Dalit with gas reserves estimated at 500 billion cubic feet.

“The Leviathan exploration has the potential of being twice the size of Tamar, which was the largest gas discovery globally in 2009,” Richard Gussow, a research analyst at Deutsche Bank, said Thursday.

In addition, there’s been a major oil discovery onshore as well of a field roughly the size of Hibernia with additional prospects offshore.

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