News

October 12, 2009

The Great Eastern Mediterranean Gas Hunt Fuels Old Regional Rivalries

By Martin Clark

A new and emerging gas province is shaping up right on the doorstep of Europe.

These are still early days but drilling success earlier this year offshore Israel has generated a great deal of excitement around the Eastern Mediterranean Sea.

At the turn of the year, US explorer Noble Energy struck gas with its Tamar-1 well, unearthing a reservoir of 7.3 trillion cubic feet of natural gas. It could be more: since announcing the find, the company has raised the reserves estimate twice already.

No sooner had it found this field, when  Noble announced a second discovery, Dalit, a smaller but significant addition nonetheless, with initial resource estimates of around 500 billion cubic feet.To understand the excitement it is important to put the twin finds in perspective. These discoveries simply dwarf anything previously identified offshore Israel, which currently has just one small producing field, Mary B, feeding local energy demand.

The scale of these reserves are...