Jan 22nd, 2020
Jeremy Beckman
Leviathan is Israel’s third offshore natural gas field development and the most ambitious to date for operator Noble Energy.
Leviathan is Israel’s third offshore natural gas field development and the most ambitious to date for operator Noble Energy. Discovered in 2010 by Noble and partners Delek Drilling and Ratio Oil Exploration, Leviathan, as its name suggests, is a deepwater giant. The field contains an estimated 35 tcf in-place and 22 tcf recoverable. The first phase of Leviathan development consists of four subsea production wells tied back to a shallow water production platform where gas will be processed to meet pipeline specifications. Its initial 1.2 bcf/d throughput will more than double the production capacity connected to the Israeli grid, meeting Israel’s growing domestic demand while enabling exports to neighboring countries and global gas markets. And the topsides installation completed last September, was the first commercial test of Sleipnir, the world’s newest and largest semisubmersible heavy lift crane vessel.
The field is situated 129 km (80 mi) west of Haifa in the gas-prolific Levantine basin - other nearby discoveries include the Noble-operated Tamar; its Aphrodite field offshore southeast Cyprus; and Eni’s Zohr off northeast Egypt. Transocean’s semisub Sedco Express drilled the Leviathan-1 discovery well in November 2010 in 1,645 m (5,397 ft) of water in what was then the Rachel license, finding gas in a similar geological/depositional setting to Tamar in various sub-salt Miocene intervals.
