A New Era of Mideast Energy? | FrontPage Magazine: Finally, a piece of good news from the Middle East after almost a year of mostly bad.
The Middle Eastern energy picture took a turn for the better when Cyprus announced on December 28 that natural gas had been discovered off its southern coast where exploration had been taking place since last September. American-based Noble Energy of Houston, the company conducting the drilling operation for the joint Israeli-Greek Cypriot venture, said the field, named Aphrodite, may contain as much as 5 to 8 million cubic feet. The discovery is said to be large enough to meet Cyprus’s natural gas needs for the next 240 years and, even more encouraging, comes after only the first of 11 offshore areas marked out by the Cypriot government has been explored.
