The Abjac Mazal oil prospecting company announced that it has struck methane gas in “relatively large quantities” at a drilling site in northern Galilee.
Methane is viewed as a far cleaner energy source than the butane gas commonly used for cooking in Israel. Butane is a byproduct of petroleum.
Further testing is needed to establish the size of the deposit and its commercial viability at the site near Kibbutz Gonen in the Hula Valley.
Gonen 6 is one of eight wells drilled in the Hula Valley in the 1980s and then abandoned. Methane is a swamp gas; its only previous find took place in the Hula in the 1980s, but that reservoir suddenly dried up.
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