Free Republic

Jerusalem (AFP) - Israel's top court on Sunday struck down a landmark deal regulating exploitation of Mediterranean gas reserves, in a major defeat for Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu who called the ruling "mystifying". A panel of Supreme Court justices said in their ruling that a clause in the plan that prevented it from being changed for a decade was unacceptable. "We have decided to cancel the gas deal because of the stability clause" that would have barred future governments from altering the deal, they said. The court however suspended the ruling for a year to enable the parliament to amend...

The massive Leviathan gas field was discovered in Israel’s offshore Levant Basin over six years ago, and while it theoretically puts Israel on the global energy map for the first time and could change the geopolitical dynamics of the entire Middle East, the Israelis themselves seem to be doing everything in their power to keep it from coming online. Its owners—U.S.-based Noble Energy and Israeli partner Delek Group—along with their shareholders are probably wondering if gas is ever going to come out of this giant of giants. At stake is a massive gas field worth $5-$6 billion and believed to...

Israel's offshore oil and gas fields could mean decades of self-sufficiency, and big profits for Noble Energy and its billionaire partner. All big oil and gas fields have geopolitical significance, but in recent years we haven't seen one with the potential to matter more than Leviathan--a prospect off the coast of northern Israel. Noble Energy in Houston will begin drilling a $150 million well into Leviathan in October. Noble's partners on the well, subsidiaries of billionaire Yitzhak Tshuva's Delek Group, announced in late August that Leviathan is estimated to contain 16 trillion cubic feet of easily recoverable gas, while its...