Posted on 08/30/2010 12:18:43 PM PDT by lbryce
All big oil and gas fields have geopolitical significance, but we haven’t seen a big oil find in recent years that could matter more than the Leviathan field in the Mediterranean Sea off of Israel. In recent days Houston-based Noble Energy and its Israeli partner Delek (controlled by Israeli billionaire Yitzhak Tshuva) announced that Leviathan could hold upwards of 4.3 billion barrels of oil.
This is hugely important for Israel, which doesn’t exactly see eye-to-eye with its oil-rich Arab neighbors. Israel is almost completely reliant on imported oil, producing less than 4,000 barrels per day of its 250,000 bpd demand. If Leviathan pans out, it could have enough oil to satisfy Israel for more than two decades.
We already knew Leviathan was big. In June, Noble (which owns roughly 40% of the find) and Delek (roughly 50% through two subsidiaries) announced that the field is thought to hold upwards of 16 trillion cubic feet of natural gas. This was on top of another 8 tcf in the nearby Tamar discovery. All this gas means Israel will be able to meet its own gas needs for 50 years or more. (For reference, see my recent story on America’s Biggest Oil Fields.)
Aside from the people of Israel, the biggest winners here are clearly Noble, with a market cap of $12 billion, but especially Delek. The publicly traded Delek Group is controlled by Yitzhak Tshuva, who ranked #463 on Forbes’ world billionaires list with a net worth of $2.1 billion. Delek is heavily involved in real estate (it owns the Plaza in New York), water desalination and insurance, in addition to owning hundreds of gas stations in the U.S. and Israel.
(Excerpt) Read more at blogs.forbes.com ...
OIL VEY!...................
IIRC, Lebanon says this oil is in their territory too so there you have it. Unless they agree, offshore rigs are impossible to defend against rocket attacks.
Yay! Just checked my stock in an Israeli oil company. It’s up a bit today. :-)
Great news... Israel should continue to resist the world’s political pressure for peace, which always involves Israel giving up more and more. The world, particularly the west continues to side more with the Arabs which want to turn Israel up on it’s head.
I hope Israel resists any further concessions and continues to hold her own and one day gain back full control of old Jerusalem and the temple mount, which to this day is desecrated by a conquering victory mosque.
There are other ways to get to the oil.
But the name is interesting:
West Asian mythology)
Literally, ‘coiled’. The sea serpent of Hebrew myth, a restatement of the chaos-dragon Tiamat, is the same as the Ras Shamra Lotan, the seven-headed monster slain by Anat. The apocryphal Book of Enoch speaks of a companion beast. ‘And in that day will two monsters be separated a female named Leviathan to dwell in the abyss over the fountains of waters. But the male is called Behemoth which occupies with his breasts an immeasurable desert named Dendain.’ The Talmud, a compendium of the teachings of later Rabbis, states that the fins of Leviathan radiate such brilliant light as to obscure the rays of the sun. Though the plaything of Yahweh, in the last days of the world the sea serpent will repulse attacks from angels, till Behemoth kills it. According to Islamic tradition, Allah used Behemoth not as a destroyer of dragons but a firm foundation for the world, a mighty back overarching the water and the darkness below the earth.
A vivid description of Leviathan occurs in the Book of Job. To underscore man’s weakness and ignorance compared with divine greatness, Yahweh asked:‘Canst thou draw out Leviathan with an hook? … None is so fierce that dare stir him up: who then is able to stand before me? … He esteemeth iron as straw, and brass as rotten wood…. He maketh the deep to boil like a pot.’ It is not surprising that in medieval Christianity Leviathan, ‘king over all the children of pride’, was identified with hell, whose entrance iconography depicted
This is so interesting on timing. I also find it interesting that Joel Rosenberg’s fiction series includes an Israeli discovery of large quantities of oil.
The field where this oil has been now drilled has been known for more than a decade, so Joel wasn’t imagining that aspect, he likely knew of it from his work in a previous administration.
Game changer. Like the East Texas field that was found in 1930. That field alone was big enough to supply the oil for the military during WWII.
The size of the Mexican field was know to oilmen long before they were exploited. Every time I hear about “peak oil,” I wonder what the flip they are talking about.
DRILL BIBI DRILL !!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Good one.
I guess this is BEBEs, bring it on to the Mooslims.
I believe in one of his non-fiction books he discussed the possibility/probability - Israel would have been an unfortunate nation indeed in that area of the world if they didn’t have discoverable oil and they are God’s chosen people. Also, scripture talks about oil below Israel in the Old Testament. And the field was known, but the extent was not, apparently.
What’s interesting about Rosenberg is he combines his knowledge of geopolitics and the Bible and has been amazingly prescient on a number of things.
Pali’s will declair ownership, per usual.
Nobody wanted the swamps of Israel until the Jewish people turned them into rich farmland.
http://www.kiplinger.com/businessresource/forecast/archive/The_U.S._s_Untapped_Bounty_080630.html
And they fertilized the land with the ground up bodies of Palestinian children after their parents had been shoved in ovens by the Zionist dog oppressors of the Palestinian people! (/Arafat)
You win.
I would bet they're not easy to hit either!
Very true but can you take the chance? The rockets they use are fairly cheap these days
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