The location of an offshore platform is drawing environmental concern and has become a galvanizing issue in this week’s elections.
ZICHRON YAACOV, ISRAEL — Israeli Moshe Barak says his country is facing a watershed moment, but not with the Israeli-Palestinian conflict that dominates international headlines.
Rather, it’s the course of Israel’s natural gas development. The 65-year-old retired engineer says he supports natural gas production in theory – it could mean economic integration with neighboring Arab countries on top of energy independence for his fossil fuel-dependent country. But Barak says the way the energy industry is being developed in Israel alarms him.
Barak is from northern Israel, far removed from the country’s economic and tech hubs centered around Tel Aviv. As Barak hears talk of rising electricity costs, he says the government is paying too much to companies for natural gas, as opposed to subsidizing the public’s expenditures.
He also says he’s worried about the government not doing enough to prevent potential pollution and environmental damage. He fears what these changes will mean for his children and the quality of life in Israel.
“Only the interests of the rich and wealthy are being taken care of,” says Barak, a lead organizer with Shomrei Habayit, or Guardians of the Home, an Israeli social movement that opposes the current natural gas development plans.
Israel’s newest and largest gas field, Leviathan, is run by the Texas-based company Noble Energy, with production at the site to start this year. Leviathan symbolizes to some Israelis how the debate over natural gas development touches on other major issues: economic inequality, security and international relations.
The dispute over natural gas development in Israel comes as Israelis heads to the polls. The April 9 legislative elections are shaping up as a referendum on Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who’s supported the current natural gas plan. Netanyahu is months away from being Israel’s longest-serving prime minister and remains popular in polls, as Israelis credit him for bolstering Israel’s international standing and economic development.
But he also is dogged by deepening income inequality and multiple corruption allegations threatening to end his career, which have taken center stage over negotiations to end the Israeli occupation of Palestinian lands at a stalemate.
Netanyahu also faces a tough new competitor: former military chief Benny Gantz, who has formed the Blue and White Party. Leaders in the party side with activists on the natural gas debate and are calling for alternatives to the placement of the natural gas platform.
Economic Potential to Reshape a Region
Natural gas has the potential to reshape the politics and economies across the region. Israeli government officials were ecstatic when natural gas was first discovered in 2009. With Europe just a pipeline away, the discovery of natural gas fields in the Mediterranean Sea during the past decade has created opportunities for cooperation and profits in the Middle East, alongside new possibilities for conflict and competition.
Israel has since signed lucrative, billion-dollar, long-term deals to export natural gas to neighboring Egypt and Jordan, where protests against the deals, due to the ongoing Israeli-Palestinian conflict, have made headlines but not derailed the arrangements.
Israeli Parliament Member Yael Cohen Paran says he is worried about the impact of pollution from the natural gas platforms in northern Israel. Paran and others have called for the production platform to be placed 125 kilometers (about 80 miles) off the coast, near the wells, in a large floating vessel. Instead, the platform is 10 kilometers from the shore, connected to the gas field by a subsea pipeline. Condensate (one of the byproducts of the production) will then be refined in Haifa.
Natural gas has a much smaller environmental impact than oil and coal. But Paran says she’s worried that offshore production will still emit pollutants, while a terrorist attack on or malfunctioning of the system could pose serious safety concerns if too close to shore. Nearby Haifa, one of Israel’s main industrial centers and site of an oil refinery, has struggled with high air pollution and cancer rates. (The government denies the two are connected.)
According to 2016 data from Israel’s Energy Ministry, production at Israel’s current natural gas field, Tamar, released the same amount of emissions that are “known or suspected to be carcinogenic” as all of Israel’s 570 large industrial plants. Israel’s current plans for Leviathan put the production even closer to shore.
Main Environmental Groups Side With Government
Israel’s Ministry of National Infrastructures, Energy and Water Resources and the two companies developing Leviathan – Noble and Israel-based Delek – dispute all of these claims. They say the data shows the pollutants don’t actually reach people on the shores and insist they are using the most up-to-date technologies to mitigate any health and safety threats.
“The emissions from Tamar did not reach the shore. … There is no impact to the shore,” says Binni Zommer, regional vice president of Noble Energy.
Nonetheless, Zommer says Noble Energy is still investing $350 million to reduce Tamar’s emissions by 98 percent. Leviathan is being run with a different chemical that will reduce these emissions, he says.
Israel’s main environmental organizations have ultimately supported the rig’s placement miles from the shore, where the legal regulations are clearer than farther out at sea. Paran, however, says he doesn’t trust those assurances.
“I see how they deal with refineries in Haifa, and the other industries. And they are doing quite a poor job, unfortunately. And people are really suffering.”
Avi Gabbay, the leader of the Labor Party – historically one of Israel’s most powerful parties, but today polling poorly – also opposes the current placement of the gas rig. “We are in favor of development and in favor of the State of Israel enjoying gas, but we are also in favor of our health,” he said at a protest organized by Shomrei Habayit in January in Haifa.
Former Defense Minister Moshe Ya’alon, who has now joined Gant’s Blue and White Party, told Shomrei Habayit last year that during his tenure from 2013 to 2016, the plan had been to place the production facilities at a floating platform close to the wells.
Ya’alon’s statement contradicts the government’s official argument that the placement closer to shore is necessary for security reasons – a catchphrase in Israel that, when given, largely shuts down any further discussion.