14 Dec 2017
Lebanon has approved the awards of two exclusive petroleum licences for exploration and production in Blocks 4 and 9 to a consortium composed of Total, Eni International and NOVATEK.
The awards follow the earlier announcement in October that a consortium of Total, Eni and NOVATEK had submitted bids for two blocks in Lebanon’s first offshore licensing round.
Background
Lebanon relaunched the licensing round for five offshore blocks (1, 4, 8, 9 and 10) in January 2017 after a three-year delay due to political paralysis.
Lebanon sits on the Levant Basin in the eastern Mediterranean along with Cyprus, Egypt, Israel and Syria. A number of gas fields have been discovered there since 2009, such as the Leviathan and Tamar fields.
A total of 52 companies qualified earlier in the year to bid in this round.
When the process was first launched in 2013, 46 companies qualified to take part in bidding, 12 of them as operators, including Chevron, Total and Exxon Mobil.
For information regarding Lebanon’s First Licensing Round, see: Lebanese Petroleum Administration web site
Source: energy-pedia
