Israel has been by some distance US major Chevron’s key Mena area of operations since its 2020 purchase of Noble Energy gave it operatorship of the country’s two key fields, 23tcf Leviathan and 13.7tcf Tamar.
But Chevron since than has struggled to achieve the two fields’ full potential: output at both fell last year, to 1.06bn cfd for Leviathan and 0.88bn cfd at Tamar (see chart & MEES 22 March). Though output rebounded from Q4’s Tamar outage to 2.04bn cfd for Q1 (1.02bn cfd from each field), this remains shy of 2022’s record levels (see chart). And, whilst Chevron and its partners took FID on Tamar expansion from 1.1bn cfd to 1.6bn cfd in February (MEES, 23 February), plans to expand Leviathan to 2.1bn cfd remain stalled amid an on-off debate over whether to achieve this via FLNG or pipeline export to Egypt (MEES, 19 April). Intermediate plans for expansion from 1.2bn cfd to 1.4bn cfd were approved last year, however (MEES, 7 July 2023). (CONTINUED - 470 WORDS)
