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The natural Gas treasures of the sea

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coldcald well

Israel has typically been an energy importer reliant on other countries to supply its energy needs. With the recent natural gas finds in the Mediterranean sea, the status quo has been shattered, and Israel now has a surplus of natural gas from which it meets its domestic energy needs and also has enough gas to export out to other countries and make a good profit. This is now a good problem for Israel to have. With natural gas comes the option to generate electricity in a greener way. Israel had been using coal fired plants to generate the electricity that it needed before these discoveries and that had been causing a lot of atmospheric pollution and smog. With the advent of natural gas electricity based generation plants, the atmosphere in Israel has become cleaner and the cost of generating electricity has fallen drastically.

Because of this Israel gas, they have been slowly getting rid of fossil fuel and coal based electricity generation systems, using natural gas and solar power in their place. Around 30 trillion cubic meters of natural gas reserves have already been found and proven off of the Israeli coast over the last 10 years, and there are several new discoveries in the pipeline ready to be tapped into.

In the year 2009, there was a huge gas field that was discovered under the Mediterranean Sea located near the coast of Israel which had around 311 billion cubic meters of natural gas in it. This gas field would later be called the Tamar gas field, and production from this field was started in the year 2013, and it now meets around 60% of the electricity generation requirement that Israel has currently. The next gas find that happened was the Leviathan gas field, which is now known as the the largest natural gas find that has happened in the last 20 years. These discoveries have produced enough natural gas to supply Israel’s domestic energy requirements for the next 200 or so years. Whilst this is not as significant when compared to the global scale of things, this is very much relevant to the Israeli energy market, as this has made Israel, a totally energy independent country, and for the first time, an energy exporter.

The Leviathan gas field is a huge gas field that is located off the coast of Haifa, in waters that are around 5000 feet in depth. This natural gas field has been proven to have as much as 19 trillion cubic feet of usable natural gas. There have been developments occurring on this field and it is expected to go into operation by late 2019. The Tamar gas field was discovered in 2009 off the coast of Haifa, and commercial production started in the year 2013. The gas produced from this field have been used to support the LNG product which takes care of the energy needs of Israel. It is currently estimated that the Tamar gas field holds around 11.2 trillion cubic feet of natural gas, which is actually an increase from the previous estimations made. There are other gas fields like the Mari B field, the Karish and Tanin fields that exist in the Mediterranean and belong to ISrael.

 

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