The oil & gas waiting game

On June 22, Israel’s energy ministry announced that the deadline to place bids in the country’s first offshore licensing round would be pushed back until November 2017. This is the second time the bid round, which opened in November 2016, saw its end date postponed. With the second extension, it became harder to believe the Israeli energy ministry’s repeated claims that the decision was motivated by an outpouring of interest from international companies and the need to provide them with more time to prepare their bids. A few companies appear to be interested, notably Italy’s Edison and Greece’s Energean, in addition, it seems, to Indian companies, as reported by the Israeli media after a meeting between Yuval Steinitz, Israel’s energy minister and India’s Minister of State for Petroleum and Natural Gas Dharmendra Pradhan, on the sidelines of the 22nd World Petroleum Congress in Istanbul on July 12. This is in