Israel sits on nearly as much oil as Saudi Arabia...but...
Israel is a country the size of the state of New Jersey (or just a bit bigger than Wales) and in case you missed the press report of June 2011, here's another chance to read it here.
The find sits atop an estimated 250 billion barrels of oil in their Shfela Basin and could seriously be worth an investment now! (Rupert Murdock has reputedly taken a stake in Genie Energy). To put the sheer volume of Israel's reserves in perspective, take a look at the chart below.
Trapped beneath Israel's famed Shfela Basin, rests a special type of shale called kerogen. Kerogen contains bitumen, the petroleum-rich substance that the Canadians extract from the tar sands to make oil.
Like the bitumen in the oil sands, the shale in Israel is not particularly deep, and that's the rub. However...were Israel's kerogen further below the surface, where the Earth's crust reaches 160 to 340 degrees Celsius, it would have been crock-potted into crude by now.
Had this happened, drilling a Saudi-scale gusher of a well would be about as challenging as digging an artisan well in a very shallow aquifer. But, alas, the kerogen is not quite deep enough, so it holds onto its bitumen like an oyster holds a pearl, and thus one of the largest petroleum deposits in the world has sat unmolested for 70 million years...until now.
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| At the Shfela Basin. |
Israel currently relies on imports for 99% of their energy consumption, consequently, it direly needs energy. As an attempt to become more energy-independent, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has backed an extraction project hosted by Genie Energy (NYSE: GNE) to recover petroleum from Israel's bitumen rich deposits. Their plan? Expand on a procedure that Royal Dutch Shell (NYSE: RDS-B) created in 1997 called the in-situ conversion process (ICP).
Shell's ICP basically creates a giant oven beneath the earth, encircling the petroleum-laden shale. Once the shale is hot enough (650 degrees Fahrenheit), given enough time, the shale oil and gas will be released from the rock whereby it can be extracted and refined into fuel. Now you may be thinking this recovery method sounds expensive... but you'd be wrong.
Thanks to the engineer heading the project, Harold Vinegar, Ph.D, the ICP is cheap. By using the formation's own natural gas to generate heat, Vinegar and his crew have made the process relatively clean and inexpensive. The cost of extracting the crude could be as little as $35 a barrel.
Of course, this project is entirely dependent on the successful adoption of the ICP technology. If the method isn't viable, then the petroleum will sit there until someone else finds a better way to retrieve it.
But...that's why Genie Energy has devoted an entire division dedicated solely to the development of unconventional shale extraction methods like the ICP. This division, known as the Israeli Energy Initiatives (IEI), is working around the clock to get its alternative extraction processes up and running.
If the IEI can prove its methods are successful, then Genie Energy should be in the money. (globeandmail).
For Bible scholars there's a particular passage that may hint at such finds being there. (Deuteronomy: ch. 33:19 they will draw out the abundance of the seas, and the hidden treasures of the sand. [ch. 33:19]). And interestingly, Israel has discovered on land not just the Shfela Basin, but also the two huge fields of natural gas in the sea off it's coast: The Tamar field, off the Mediterranean coast south off Jaffa, and The Leviathan field, offshore near the 1949 armistice line between Israel and Lebanon.
