Skip To Content
JEWISH. INDEPENDENT. NONPROFIT.
Breaking News

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.

Republish This Story

Please read before republishing

We’re happy to make this story available to republish for free, unless it originated with JTA, Haaretz or another publication (as indicated on the article) and as long as you follow our guidelines. You must credit the Forward, retain our pixel and preserve our canonical link in Google search.  See our full guidelines for more information, and this guide for detail about canonical URLs.

To republish, copy the HTML by clicking on the yellow button to the right; it includes our tracking pixel, all paragraph styles and hyperlinks, the author byline and credit to the Forward. It does not include images; to avoid copyright violations, you must add them manually, following our guidelines. Please email us at [email protected], subject line “republish,” with any questions or to let us know what stories you’re picking up.

We don't support Internet Explorer

Please use Chrome, Safari, Firefox, or Edge to view this site.