1. Does your jurisdiction have an established upstream oil and
gas industry? What are the current production levels and what are
the oil and gas reserve levels?
The State of Israel was established in 1948. In its early days,
Israel's oil industry had some modest success. The first
oilfield, Heletz, was discovered in 1955, and yielded 17.2
million barrels of oil. Unfortunately, only small amounts of oil
have been discovered since then, though the exploration continues,
with the hope of discovering more fields.
Israel's natural gas industry was set up in 1999 with the
discovery of the Noa reservoir off the coast of Ashkelon by
the Yam Tethys partnership. A few months later another reservoir,
Mari B, was discovered. It was estimated that these reserves held
about 45 billion cubic meters (bcm) of natural gas, which provided
a limited amount of natural gas to the Israeli market and primarily
to the Israeli Electric Corporation, its main customer. Today,
these fields are
