Berri: Israel Started Stealing Lebanon's Gas
Speaker Nabih Berri revealed on Monday that Israel has already started stealing amounts of Lebanon's offshore gas, expressing astonishment at the government’s “lack of interest,” al-Akhbar daily reported.
The Speaker told the daily that he received almost certain information from an international scientific figure that Israel is stealing Lebanon's gas from a basin near the maritime borders with occupied Palestine, and at cut-rate expenses.
Expressing astonishment at the carelessness of the cabinet, Berri said: “I will do everything I can to activate this file by the beginning of the new year.”
The new Israeli assault against Lebanon, opens the doors wide on the need for the Lebanese state to implement the decrees that allow it to start drilling for gas, thus securing new revenues that could support the economy.
Lebanon and Israel are bickering over a zone that consists of about 854 square kilometers of oil reserves and suspected energy reserves that could generate billions of dollars.
Lebanon has been slow to exploit its maritime resources compared with other eastern Mediterranean countries. Israel, Cyprus and Turkey are all much more advanced in drilling for oil and gas.
In March 2010, the U.S. Geological Survey estimated a mean of 1.7 billion barrels of recoverable oil and a mean of 34.5 trillion cubic meters of recoverable gas in the Levant Basin in the eastern Mediterranean, which includes the territorial waters of Lebanon, Israel, Syria and Cyprus.
The formation of the Petroleum Authority was the first major step in future oil exploration since parliament passed a law in 2011 setting the country's maritime boundary and Exclusive Economic Zone.
The country is supposed to witness the first oil exploration process in 2015 and it will take a year to enter the production stage.
D.A.
G.K.
Source: Naharnet
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