Bloomberg: Noble Energy Sees Israeli Gas Discoveries Online in Five Years

Noble Energy Inc. expects to formally approve at least one offshore Israeli natural gas development by the end of next year.

Gas would probably begin to flow from one or both of the discoveries three to four years after Noble’s board makes so-called final investment decisions, or FIDs, Chief Executive Officer David Stover said during a conference call with analysts and investors on Monday.

With the Israeli government establishing the regulatory framework that will govern offshore energy ventures, Noble is set to begin harvesting more than 50 trillion feet of gas it has discovered in the Tamar and Leviathan fields in the eastern Mediterranean Sea. Tamar, where the first phase of output began in 2013, already supplies the gas used to make half of Israel’s electricity.

“We’ve been looking at kind of a time frame of about a year to bring all of this together to move to FID,” Stover said during the call. “I think when you look at actual first production, we’ve been talking three years to four years from FID, the first production. There is probably an opportunity that Tamar’s project could be probably a little bit quicker than Leviathan, but we’ll just have to see how that plays out.” MORE