Israel Needs to Find Gas Export Markets, Central Bank Chief Says
Israel will have to find export markets for natural gas after yesterday’s announcement of a major field off the country’s Mediterranean coast, Bank of Israel Governor Stanley Fischer said.
Delek Drilling LP and Noble Energy Inc. said drilling test results in its Leviathan field off confirm a “significant” find of at least 16 trillion cubic feet (453 billion cubic meters) of natural gas.
“We don’t have a domestic market for the Leviathan gas, at least not at the moment, so we will have to export it, and this requires a large investment in infrastructure,” Fischer said today at a central bank research department conference in Tel Aviv. “The state of Israel will have to solve the problem of where we will find markets for the gas.”
Leviathan is almost double the size of the Tamar field, discovered in 2009 by Noble, Delek and their partners, which by itself is sufficient to fulfill Israel’s estimated domestic gas needs for the next two decades.
The Leviathan find is “the largest gas discovery in deep water in the past decade,” Delek Drilling Chairman Gideon Tadmor said in an e-mailed statement. The Leviathan and Tamar partners will examine options for exporting the gas from Israel via a pipeline or by turning it into liquefied natural gas, Delek said in its statement.
To contact the reporter on this story: Alisa Odenheimer in Jerusalem at aodenheimer@bloomberg.net; Calev Ben-David in Jerusalem at cbendavid@bloomberg.net
To contact the editor responsible for this story: Louis Meixler at lmeixler@bloomberg.net
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