The Jewish Home | JULY 21, 2022
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Land of Milk, Honey, and Natural Gas How Israel’s Natural Gas Supply is Shaping the World By SHaMMaI SISkIND
“L
et me tell you something that we Israelis have against Moses,” the legendary Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir once quipped during a speech at a state dinner. “He took us 40 years through the desert to bring us to the one spot in the Middle East that has no oil.” Indeed, among the many remarkable things about Israel, one of the more peculiar aspects is its marked lack of black gold. In the fifty years since Meir made her half-joking comment, many have pointed out that Israel’s oil-less territory was a blessing in disguise. Not having easily accessible, desirable exports in abundance is perhaps the single biggest driving factor that forced the country to become the innovation miracle that it is now. Today, when people think about brilliant, era-defining creativity, they’re not thinking about Saudi Arabia and its 260 billion barrels of proven oil reserves – they’re thinking about a small sliver of land off the Mediterranean coast. Yet still, the lack of naturally occurring fossil fuels has been a real challenge for Israeli society throughout its short history. From a purely economic point of view, energy costs have always been exorbitantly high in Israel compared to other countries. Currently, a gallon of gasoline in the country costs over nine dollars. The lowest the price has been in the past ten years was in late 2020, when the average was hovering around $5.25. Similarly, when coming at it from a national security perspective, Israel has always been in a precarious situation regarding energy: The nations that possessed the lion’s share of the world’s proven oil reserves also happened to be Israel’s sworn enemies. Many still remember the global gas shortages of the 1970s, triggered when Arab nations banned the sale of petrol to countries that supported Israel during the Yom Kippur War. It is precisely events like the OPEC embargo that highlight just how much fossil fuels are inextricably bound to geopolitics – but more on that later. For years, Israel has had to make peace with its energy dependency. But that is beginning to change. Moshe Rabbeinu may have brought us to the one land in the Middle East without fossil fuels. But as it turns out, there were surprises lurking miles below Israel’s ocean surface.
Two Decades of Israel Gas Exploration The energy revolution currently taking place in Israel did not pop up overnight. The story goes back over twenty years when, in 1999, Israel’s Oil Commissioner granted BG Group (a British petrol firm since bought out by a Dutch competitor) preliminary exploratory permits for deep-sea block exploration. Oceanographic scans of areas off of Israel’s coast, specifically one region some 80 miles west of Haifa, showed geological formations strongly indicative of natural gas pockets. The initial explorations dragged on for years, and the permit granted to BG expired in 2003. Still, the private stakeholders in the venture were adamant. The evidence of gas fields in the area was too strong to simply abandon the project. They convinced the Israeli authorities to extend the permit. Two years passed. Nothing. By April 2005, BG had announced that it was abandoning its stake. But the following year, Texas-based exploration company Noble Energy joined the project as operator. The involvement of Noble seemed to breathe
new life into the whole enterprise, and in 2006, the state license was extended to December 31, 2008. In November 2008, less than two months before their deadline, Noble and its Israeli partners began drilling after some seismic studies were able to pinpoint a formation where there was “a 35% chance” the location contained gas. Why go ahead setting up a drill rig with a two-thirds chance of failure? Well, those same studies further indicated that if there was gas, the median estimate for the producible quantity was over 100 billion cubic meters (BCM). The risk was high, but the potential return was enormous. Finally, in late 2008, drilling was conducted to a depth of 4,900 meters. The operation cost $92 million. But it was the one that finally bore fruit. On January 17, 2009, Noble and its partners officially announced it had tapped the Tamar natural gas field. Estimated reserves: 284 BCM. The discovery of Tamar was certainly welcome news in Israel at the time and generated quite a bit of fanfare. But it would hardly compare to the next finding that would come soon after.
