The Israel Petroleum Board has recommended Government approval for an agreement signed recently between the Petrocana Oil Company and the Livingston Oil Company of Tulsa, Oklahoma, for the exploration for petroleum deposits along Israel’s continental shelf, it was announced here today. Petrocana owns the concession for such exploration.
It is now expected that operations on offshore drilling will begin in April or May of this year when a drilling contractor, a U.S. Mexican consortium, is scheduled to send a 40-man team and a drilling vessel. The probe will include six exploratory wells at various points along the coast at distances ranging from just offshore to up to nine miles out.
The partners in the venture are optimistic about the prospects of finding oil and point out that in the Gulf of Suez, where offshore operations began in 1962, some 200, 000, 000 tons of proved recoverable reserves have been discovered. Seismological surveys carried out off Israel’s Mediterranean coast last summer have revealed that there are several promising structures along the coastline and lead to the belief that oil is present in at least the same quantity as in the Gulf of Suez.
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