By Douglas V. Gibbs
On September 22, 2008 I received from a Christian site I am a member of (CrossDaily) an email with a subject line reading: "Is Israel sitting on top of an oil reserve?" The email suggested that Israel sits atop a massive oil reserve, and that a company known as Zion Oil & Gas was searching for the oil, guided by the biblical passage in Genesis 49:25 that reads, "By the God of your father who will help you, And by the Almighty who will bless you With blessings of heaven above, Blessings of the deep that lies beneath, Blessings of the breasts and of the womb."
Many believe that the verse from Genesis, as well as a number of other passages in the Bible, points towards the existence of oil deep beneath the Land of Israel. This belief has been supported by American and Israeli experts in oil exploration. One of those Americans visited Israel in 1985, and was inspired. After that visit by John Brown, a fourteen year process began, that culminated in the creation of Zion Oil & Gas, Inc., and for the company to begin exploring for oil in April 2000. Drilling began in northern Israel in 2005. The combined results have only strengthened the commitment of on-going oil exploration in Israel.
Prior to receiving that email, I had heard stories about Israel having oil, and that there was an ongoing effort to locate that oil. I had also heard that the search was inspired by the Bible.
Imagine. Oil under Israel. The joke has always been, "of all the lands granted to Israel, it had to be the one spot in all of the Middle East without oil."
It turns out that not only is the joke wrong, but that Israel may very well have a larger reserve of oil than all of Saudi Arabia.
Today, during my Political Pistachio Radio Revolution program, during which Israel was one of the main topics in connection to a possible correlation between natural disasters and the treatment of Israel by the United States and other nations, a listener put a link in the chatroom for an article titled, "Look Out, Saudis? Israel Is Sitting On Huge Oil Shale Deposits." The article claims that "The World Energy Council has determined that about 30 miles southwest of Jerusalem, in the Shfela Basin, there are oil shale deposits with the potential to yield 250 billion barrels of oil. This represents the world’s third-largest quantity of oil shale behind the US and China. Oilprice.com notes that both those countries would consume almost all their own production, so Israel could conceivably become the world’s largest exporter of shale oil."
The article goes on to say, "Saudi Arabia’s proven oil reserves are 260 billion barrels, so we would appear to be in the running as an energy giant — particularly in view of the enormous natural gas finds at the Tamar and Leviathan fields. But there’s quite a distance yet to travel. For one thing, extracting oil from shale isn’t the same as drilling it out of the ground. It’s more difficult and more expensive."
With technology the ease and price of extracting oil from shale as improved greatly.
It may take a while, but Israel is on the verge of becoming a major oil supplier.
Making the land even more valuable...and possibly creating greater conditions for a showdown in the Middle East.
-- Political Pistachio Conservative News and Commentary
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