Leviathan Gas Field Delayed

Time to read
1 minute
Read so far

Leviathan Gas Field Delayed

2 comments

Almost ten years ago a natural gas field off the coast of Israel has been discovered. The exploitation is now beeing delayed in the last possible minute because of concerns about health hazards. Now objections are being examined all over again.

A spokeswoman for the Israeli company Delek said that the Leviathan field will be delayed for a few days. The delay was ordered by the Israeli Ministry of the Environment. The operators of the gas field must first ensure that the production does not pose any health risks to residents on the Israeli coast, the ministry said. It had already been expected that toxic substances could possibly escape when the production starts. 

Leviathan is located about 130 kilometers west of the port city of Haifa at about 1700 meters sea depth. The drilling rig with platform is located ten kilometers off the Israeli coast. The exploitation is performed by the American company Noble Energy and the Israeli companies Delek and Ratio Oil Exploration. The privately financed development of the largest energy project in Israel's history has so far cost the equivalent of more than 3.4 billion euros. Exports to Egypt and Jordan are to begin shortly after gas production begins.

Comments

Submitted by Maxim (not verified) on Fri, 12/27/2019 - 11:16 Permalink

The rig 10 km from the Israeli coast is not a drilling rig. It’s a gas processing rig (built offshore due to opposition from residents). That said yes, there is still very strong opposition from residents to the projects. However, all of their appeals against the projects have been rejected, it having gone through all the stringent environmental reviews.

So, not “everything is being re-evaluated”. Noble is being forced to make sure that its environmental monitoring equipment on the rig is properly calibrated, something that they should have started doing weeks ago but didn’t. The Israeli ministry of the environment won’t let the gas processing on the rig commence until they are satisfied all the monitoring equipment is fully functional.

Add new comment

The content of this field is kept private and will not be shown publicly.

Text only

  • No HTML tags allowed.
  • Lines and paragraphs break automatically.
  • Web page addresses and email addresses turn into links automatically.
CAPTCHA
This question is for testing whether or not you are a human visitor and to prevent automated spam submissions.