East Mediterranean’s new play gets hotter
Israel’s burgeoning gas reserves could transform a region
The discoveries just keep on coming. In February, it was Tanin, in the Alon A licence area 120 km northwest of Haifa. Two months earlier, in Cyprus’s block 12, it was Galit, another discovery by US firm Noble Energy. And a year before that, it was Leviathan, the subsea giant that promises to end Israeli worries about its energy security – and make a fortune for the field’s developers. All told, recent discoveries – there have been six significant ones in the past two years – in the Levant basin, which stretches from the Gaza Strip to Cyprus, amount to around 1.1 trillion cubic metres (cm) of gas, or about a third of the reserves the US Geological Survey estimates it holds. The trove could be
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