Israel has announced the launch of its second bid round to grant exploration licenses for natural gas and oil in Israel’s economic waters in the Eastern Mediterranean. The upcoming bid round is pursuant to an earlier round which began 2 years ago and granted 6 licenses, some of which are expected to commence drilling in the upcoming months.

In the new bid round, licenses for 19 blocks will be issued in five zones. Each block measures up to 400 sq km (250 sq mi) and each zone, consisting of multiple blocks, can be as large as 1600 sq km (1000 sq mi). The decision to market the blocks in zones is to allow better correlation between the exploration areas and subsurface geological structures that potentially contain oil and gas reservoirs. Holding larger interests will allow efficient subsurface evaluation and will increase the attractiveness of the zones to investors.

The zones are located in the southern extent of Israel’s economic waters, an area which has been previously licensed in part and had previous seismic research and limited exploration activity. The existing research indicates the potential for the discovery of hydrocarbons in the bid round area.