Noble Energy Inc. (NYSE: NBL) president and CEO David Stover has delivered good news for Israel's natural gas and oil sector. He told a UBS conference in the US, "It's possible that over the next few years gas reserves in the Israel region will rise to 35-45 trillion cubic feet (TCF) compared with the current level of 25 trillion cubic feet that we know about."

45 TCF would be nearly triple the size of known 16 TCF reserves in the Leviathan gas field, the largest gas discovery worldwide over the past decade, and of which Noble holds 39.6%. Noble also holds a major stake in the Tamar gas field which has 8.4 TCF and smaller discoveries at Dalit, Mary B and Noa.

Stover added, "The fact that we have found the two largest discoveries in the world over the past decade in the past few years, has opened up for us a region of new and large activities. In the coming few years, we will continue developing Tamar and Leviathan and at the same time continue our exploration activities in the region.

He continued, "We plan completing development of the Tamar project by the end of 2012 and beginning to supply gas to consumers in 2013. I expect that by the time we will begin providing gas from Tamar we will already have started working on the next stage of developing this field to meet the growing domestic demand of recent years."

Regarding Leviathan Stover said, "Drilling the first Leviathan well has been completed and we abandoned drilling of the second well due to difficulties, but we will very soon begin redrilling the structure."

He said that when work has finished on the second Leviathan well, the company would remain in the region and undertake additional exploration in 2012.

Published by Globes, Israel business news - www.globes-online.com - on May 26, 2011

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