With major finds in the Levant Basin, including the Leviathan (21.4 TCF) and Tamar (11.2 TCF) reservoirs and others, Delek is leading the region’s development into a major natural gas … Abir’s predecessor, Nadine Baudot-Trajtenberg, who spearheaded efforts to form the fund, has said the central bank will likely take bigger risks with the gas money than with its $147 billion in forex reserves. Israel discovered huge deposits of natural gas in the east Mediterranean a decade ago and major production began in 2013. Natural gas is evaporating into the air “all the time. The company said it enhanced “important safeguards,” including 24-hour surveillance to prevent seeps, after the California spill and that it responded “responsibly and transparently” to the Brazil incident.Israeli energy stocks have rallied since the tie-up between Chevron and Noble was announced on July 20. Those interests account for 61% of Noble’s value, HSBC Holdings Plc said in a research note last month.Leviathan has a capacity of about 1.2 billion cubic feet a day of gas. His ministry aims to cut coal use completely by 2025, replacing it with solar power and natural gas.Israeli environmentalists claim Chevron is more tainted than its rivals when it comes to pollution. ... Israel-based SolarEdge ... Kinder Morgan transports and stores natural gas, oil, and other valuable …

Natural gas is evaporating into the air “all the time. (Bloomberg) -- Israel’s energy minister is “confident” the country’s regulators will allow Chevron Corp. to operate the local natural gas assets of Noble Energy Inc., despite a campaign by environmentalists to stop that from happening.A public hearing about oil spills elsewhere in the world involving Chevron, which agreed to buy Houston-based Noble for about $5 billion last month, is “not necessary,” according to Energy Minister Yuval Steinitz.“With natural gas, there is no problem with spills,” he said in a phone interview on Tuesday. At a parliamentary hearing on Tuesday, Abir said political stalemate with three elections in 2019 and 2020 had also delayed the formation of a committee to oversee the fund. “It will have a higher-risk profile like simple assets, like stocks and corporate bonds,” she said. Noble rose 0.3% to $10.68 at 9:49 a.m. in New York.Steinitz said he has since had a “very good” call with CEO Mike Wirth. In December, hundreds of people protested over concerns that production at the nation’s biggest deposit, the Leviathan field located six miles (9.7 kilometers) from the shoreline, would worsen air quality on land.Noble operates and holds stakes in Leviathan, which started producing in December, and Tamar, Israel’s second-largest gas field. Chevron Corps US$5 billion offer to acquire Noble Energy emerged after the US oil major first proposed taking a stake of at least 50 percent in Nobles Eastern Mediterranean natural-gas fields, … Delek Group is an independent E&P and the pioneering visionary behind the development of the East Med. In 2013, it agreed to pay $42 million to settle lawsuits over spills off Brazil’s coast.“The Chevron track record is to cut and run and litigate rather than respect local laws,” said Yosef Abramowitz, chief executive officer of solar energy company Energiya Global, and a signatory of the appeal to reconsider Chevron’s entry into Israel. This is a natural process,” Steinitz said.Environmental activists have tried to delay investments in Israel’s emerging gas industry before, albeit with little success. IDE is the company that makes Israel a world leader in desalination technology, having built some 400 desalination plants around the world. Just as Israel prepares to produce and export large amounts of gas, the United States, Australia, Qatar and Russia are flooding the market with cheap gas. Israel has begun converting many of its power plants to natural gas to take advantage of the vast reserves discovered off its shores. Israel has pushed back the creation of a sovereign wealth fund because tax revenue from natural gas has not yet hit the minimum needed to begin investing, and fund managers have not yet … FILE PHOTO: An aerial view shows the foundation platform of Leviathan natural gas field, in the Mediterranean Sea, off the coast of Haifa, Israel January 31, 2019. “Part of that is because the companies involved were able to offset some of the tax against the investments that they have made and it slowed down the process,” he told Reuters.

The fund, aimed at staving off an overheated currency from the sudden explosion in national wealth — known as the Dutch disease — was supposed to begin in 2018, but political turmoil and a slower stream of revenue have caused delays. The minister declined to say how the energy major would be involved with the so-called EastMed pipeline project, a 6 billion euro ($7 billion) plan to connect gas from Israel and Cyprus to buyers in southern Europe.“If Chevron can work in Canada, in Britain, in Japan and in Australia, there is no reason it won’t be able to work in Israel,” Steinitz said. He said tax income may not be released for wealth fund investments, to be managed by the central bank, until 2023. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said tens of billions of dollars raised from taxing natural gas sales would be invested abroad via a sovereign wealth fund, with proceeds brought home for education, welfare and other services.

the demand for oil and natural gas, both locally in Israel and globally; and ? That’s partly because San Ramon, California-based Chevron would probably boost the Mediterranean country’s gas exports, according to several analysts. Last year, the company had to clean up nearly 800,000 gallons of oil and water that leaked in Kern County, California.