Partners in Israel’s Leviathan offshore gas project announced Sunday that they have agreed to invest US$568 million to build a third pipeline that will allow increased production and exports of natural gas by Israel.
According to Reuters, the third pipeline will connect the well, located in deep waters in the eastern Mediterranean, to a production facility about ten kilometers offshore.
The Leviathan consortium includes operator Chevron and Israel’s NewMed Energy and Ratio Energies.
The project currently supplies gas to Israel, Egypt and Jordan, and there are plans to sell gas to Europe as well.
Work is scheduled to start in the second half of 2025, according to the partners, which is when production at Leviathan jumps to 14 billion cubic meters annually from 12 billion cubic meters.
The expansion of production capacity and future liquefaction through a dedicated liquefaction facility will allow us to supply more natural gas to the local and regional markets and very soon also to the global market, said the CEO of NewMed Energy, Yossi Abu.
In June 2022, Egypt, Israel and the EU signed a memorandum of understanding, which the three parties described as historic, to export Israeli natural gas to Europe via Egypt.
Egypt and Israel had agreed to connect the giant Leviathan field with Egyptian liquefaction units through a marine pipeline in early 2021, with the aim of maximizing natural gas resources and reserves in the region.
Leviathan – one of the largest deep-water gas discoveries in the world – contains an estimated 22 trillion cubic feet of gas, approximately 120 kilometers west of Haifa, with a water depth of 1.7 kilometers.
Leviathan currently transfers a maximum capacity of 1.2 billion cubic feet of natural gas per day, or 12 billion cubic meters annually, to Israel, Egypt and Jordan.
