The long search for oil in Israel will continue, and for the first time, it will involve offshore drilling as well.
Oil magnate Armand Hammer announced at a news conference that he had signed a $25 million deal with Israel’s Energy Ministry and would begin building Israel’s first offshore drilling rig on a platform some 10 miles off the Tel Aviv coastline.
The platform, to be operated by Hammer’s Occidental Petroleum Co., is expected to begin operation by the end of the year.
Hammer also visited for a half-hour with ex-Prime Minister Menachem Begin at his Jerusalem home. Hammer is one of the few outsiders whom Begin entertains at his apartment, which has become his veritable hermitage since he quit office in 1983.
Hammer told reporters that he urged the former premier to begin writing his memoirs soon, and that he had found Begin in good health.
At an earlier news conference Monday, Hammer said Occidental’s oil geologists indicate there could be a billion barrels of oil under the sea floor in Israeli waters at a depth of about 17,000 feet.
The offshore well he proposes to dig will be the deepest ever in Israel’s long and mostly fruitless search for oil.
Hammer signed a three-year contract with the government giving Occidental exploration rights on 1,850 square miles undersea and 4,350 square miles in the Negev.
It will cost $25 million of which the Israel government will pay 34 percent, according to Energy Minister Moshe Shahal.
Hammer, a Russian-born American Jew, is a frequent visitor to Israel. He is here now to celebrate his 90th birthday and to dedicate projects funded through his philanthropy.
Hammer, who says he feels more like 40 than 90, was to attend a $10,000 birthday party here Tuesday night sponsored by the Tel Aviv Foundation for Arts and Culture.
On Wednesday, he will lay the cornerstone of a $2 million Jewish-Arab community center in the run-down Ajami quarter of Jaffa. Hammer raised more than $1.5 million for the project, which was initiated by the foundation.
The oil magnate will also dedicate a new wing of the Assaf Harofe Hospital near Saraf in southern Israel.
Hammer, who was trained as a medical doctor, built his fortune on the basis of art treasures he was allowed by Lenin to take out of the Soviet Union immediately after the Bolshevik revolution in 1917. Lenin’s gesture was in appreciation for medical treatment Hammer provided the revolutionaries.
Since then, he has been on friendly terms with every Soviet leader and has played a major role in many behind-the-scenes arrangements on behalf of Soviet Jews.
Hammer visits Moscow regularly. Referring to his recent meeting with Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev, Hammer said, “It won’t be long before (Premier Yitzhak) Shamir or (Foreign Minister Shimon) Peres is received in Moscow. I am working toward that end.”
But he indicated this would not happen until after Israel’s elections in November.
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