Palestinian Firm Is First in Line To Buy Natural Gas From Israel’s Leviathan
A Palestinian electric company was the first to sign an agreement to buy gas from Israel’s Leviathan natural gas field.
The Palestine Power Generation Company signed a 20-year deal to purchase $1.2 billion worth of gas, some 4.75 billion cubic meters, from the Leviathan group, according to reports. The Leviathan partners informed the Tel Aviv Stock Exchange of the agreement on Sunday, according to Haaretz.
Palestine Power is planning to build a $300 million power plant in Jenin and use the Leviathan gas to operate it, Reuters reported. The plant will be completed in about three years.
The Leviathan field, located about 80 miles west of Haifa in northern Israel, has not yet begun gas production; it is scheduled to start in 2017. The partners are Avner Oil Exploration, Delek Drilling and Ratio Oil Exploration.
In June, Israel’s Cabinet approved the export of about 40 percent of the country’s recently discovered reserves of natural gas while keeping a 25-year supply for national consumption. The decision was upheld in October by the Israeli Supreme Court.
Several large natural gas fields have been discovered in the Mediterranean Sea off the coast of Israel in recent years. There are projected to be approximately 950 billion cubic meters of gas in the fields.
It’s our birthday and we’re still celebrating!
We hope you appreciated this article. Before you go, we’d like to ask you to please support the Forward’s independent Jewish news.
This week we celebrate 129 years of the Forward. We’re proud of our origins as a Yiddish print publication serving Jewish immigrants. And we’re just as proud of what we’ve become today: A trusted source of Jewish news and opinion, available digitally to anyone in the world without paywalls or subscriptions.
We’ve helped five generations of American Jews make sense of the news and the world around them — and we aren’t slowing down any time soon.
As a nonprofit newsroom, reader donations make it possible for us to do this work. Support independent, agenda-free Jewish journalism and our board will match your gift in honor of our birthday!
Support our mission to tell the Jewish story fully and fairly.
