Israeli Infrastructures Minister Binyamin Ben-Eliezer said that the find was of “historic proportions,” and that it could change the face of Israel’s economy.
Arutz 7 Radio reports that the Houston-based Noble Energy company, drilling for Israel’s Delek fuel company, announced that it has discovered a huge deposit of natural gas under the Mediterranean Sea near Haifa.
If verified, the news will come as a welcome surprise to the government in Nicosia, which last year announced their own data indicated that there are oil and gas deposits in a sea area separating the island from Egypt to its south and Lebanon to its east.
According to Arutz 7, 87 billion cubic meters, or nearly 3.1 trillion cubic feet, of high-quality gas are estimated to be in three deposits in the Tamar Drilling site.
The gas is located 90 kilometers west of Haifa, between Israel and Cyprus, but the rights to the Cypriot drilling sites are also owned by an Israeli company.
The depth of the water above the find is 1.7 kilometers, over a mile, and the gas is located another 4.9 kilometers deep in an area 140 meters wide.
The Cyprus government signed agreements with Egypt in 2005 and Lebanon in early January this year delineating their sea boundaries in the eastern Mediterranean to facilitate future underwater oil and gas exploration.
In November the government accused Turkey of harassing two Panamanian-flagged oil research vessels in international waters.
The dispute came as little surprise to many political commentators, some of whom have long predicted that oil and gas exploration by either side would stoke tensions in the region.
Turkish Cypriots have strongly objected to any exploration by the Greek Cypriots and said that any natural reserves discovered belong to both sides.
Some studies suggest that there could be undersea reserves of up to eight billion barrels of crude oil off Cyprus.
Copyright © Famagusta Gazette 2009
Dominic Farrell
