Natural gas in Israel is the country's primary energy source for electricity production. Israel began producing natural gas from its own offshore gas fields in 2004. Between 2005 and 2012, Israel imported gas from Egypt via the al-Arish-Ashkelon pipeline, an arrangement that ended due to Egyptian Crisis of 2011-14. In 2017, Israel was producing over 9 billion cubic meters (bcm) of natural gas a year. Israel had 1,087 billion cubic meters (cu m) of proven reserves of natural gas as of 2022. In early 2017, Israel began exporting natural gas to the Kingdom of Jordan.
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In this Dossier
Natural gas in Israel in the context of Economy of Israel
The economy of Israel is a highly developed free-market economy. The prosperity of Israel's advanced economy allows the country to have a sophisticated welfare state, a powerful modern military said to possess a nuclear-weapons capability with a full nuclear triad, modern infrastructure equivalent to developed countries, and a high-technology sector competitively on par with Silicon Valley. It has the second-largest number of startup companies in the world after the United States, and the third-largest number of NASDAQ-listed companies after the U.S. and China. American companies, such as Intel, Microsoft, and Apple, built their first overseas research and development facilities in Israel. More than 400 high-tech multi-national corporations, such as IBM, Google, Hewlett-Packard, Cisco Systems, Facebook and Motorola have opened R&D centers throughout the country. As of 2025, the IMF estimated Israel has the 25th largest economy in the world by nominal GDP, and one of the biggest economies in the Middle East.[1]
The country's major economic sectors are high-technology and industrial manufacturing. The Israeli diamond industry is one of the world's centers for diamond cutting and polishing, amounting to 21% of all exports in 2017. As the country is relatively poor in natural resources, it consequently depends on imports of petroleum, raw materials, wheat, motor vehicles, uncut diamonds and production inputs. Nonetheless, the country's nearly total reliance on energy imports may change in the future as recent discoveries of natural gas reserves off its coast and the Israeli solar energy industry have taken a leading role in Israel's energy sector.