Posted on: Sunday, September 12, 2004
'Divine' prophecy inspires oil hunter
By Peter Enav
Associated Press
JERUSALEM — An ultra-Orthodox Jew is trying to do what no one has done in Israel since 1955 — find a new source of oil in a land more associated with Jaffa oranges and Merkava tanks.
Tovia Luskin is launching a new drilling venture northeast of Tel Aviv, in a 77-square-mile field that he estimates has up to a billion barrels of oil. Skeptics call it a pipe dream.
Luskin has an Old Testament beard, something of a messianic mindset, and impressive oil credentials: a degree in geology from Moscow State University and 15 years of experience working for large oil companies in Canada, Indonesia and Australia.
He acknowledges that Israel's long history of drilling dry holes raises questions about his chances for success. "There have been 50 years of failures," he says.
Still, Luskin says, detailed geological studies from leading North American oil consulting companies — and his own religious faith — suggest that when drilling starts in October at his Meged oil field 15 miles northeast of Tel Aviv, the long dry run of bad luck will end.
Luskin arrived in Israel in 1990, shortly after becoming convinced that a charismatic Brooklyn-based rabbi named Menachem Mendel Schneerson was the messiah. Known as the Lubavitcher rebbe, Schneerson died in 1994, but not before giving Luskin a special prediction.
"The Lubavitcher rebbe told me that my efforts to drill for oil in Israel would succeed," he said. "Without this blessing I would have given up long ago."
Schneerson's prophecy, if realized, would be a big turnaround for a country that has produced only 20 million barrels of oil in the past half-century — less than what neighboring Saudi Arabia pumps every three days.
Some local comedians quip that Moses wandered the desert for 40 years before coming on the only spot in the Middle East without oil.
Luskin insists they are wrong.
"In the 1980s I did a detailed analysis of Israel's oil potential," he says. "I concluded it has a lot."
A survey carried out for the Israeli government in 2000 by international oil experts seems to back him up. It estimated that Israel might have 2 billion to 4 billion barrels of oil offshore and an additional 500 million barrels onshore — a total that would put it on a par with Ecuador, a middling international producer.
But those estimates are not in the "proven" category and, even if they were, there's no guarantee the fields could be exploited.
Oil in Israel has always been a slippery matter. Large oil companies have traditionally steered clear of the Jewish state for fear of alienating major Arab oil producers.
Unfavorable geological conditions have also scared off prospectors, but not Luskin.
His Givot Olam Petroleum Co. plans technologically sophisticated drillings at Meged. The cost could run as high as $50 million — a sum Luskin says he will raise on the Tel Aviv Stock Exchange.
Three wells already drilled at the field support the notion that oil is present, Luskin said, but have come up largely empty. Garb, Grubbs, Harris & Associates, a Dallas-based oil consulting company, and Chapman Petroleum Engineering Consultants of Calgary, Alberta, both concluded in 2001 that Meged could produce commercial quantities of oil.
Luskin said that 20 percent of the billion barrels he believes might lie beneath Meged would be recoverable. This would be enough to provide Israel with 20,000 barrels of oil per day over several decades. That's a little less than 10 percent of its current daily requirement, which is now met by non-Arab exporters such as Russia and Mexico.
But burdened by memories of a long line of divinely inspired oil prospectors drilling dry holes, some Israelis believe Luskin's optimism is misplaced.
"The Meged field is a very tough case," says Israeli oil expert Yosi Langodski, who tried to develop it in the 1980s. "Production there won't be simple."
Over the past four decades, a half-dozen foreign oil men have tried their luck in Israel, all without success. Most were evangelical Christians, often operating on a shoestring budget, says Moshe Goldberg, Israel's oil commissioner until 1995.
"They came here with a divine vision that God could promise lots of oil," Goldberg says. "But they were also serious oil professionals."
Goldberg says one of his first professional contacts was with Wesley Hancock, a California geologist who arrived in Israel in 1961 after dreaming there was oil in a place called Nahalat Shevet Asher — the patrimony of the tribe of Asher, one of the sons of Jacob.
Goldberg says that Hancock based his belief on a combination of geological knowledge and a reading of Genesis 49:20, in which Jacob promises that "Asher's food shall be rich and he shall yield royal dainties."
The passage contains a derivative of the Hebrew word "shemen," which can mean both edible and hydrocarbon oil.
Over the years, Goldberg says, Hancock was succeeded by a number of like-minded oil explorers, almost all from the United States.
In the end, he says, none discovered oil.
