Israel is seeking gas supplies from Russia's OAO Gazprom (GAZP.RS) and a BP PLC (BP) Azeri field, a top Israeli official said this week.
In an interview with Dow Jones Newswires, Hezi Kugler, a director general at Israel's ministry of national infrastructures, said Gazprom and Israel are conducting a pre-feasability study to estimate the size of gas supplies it could provide to the country.
He said the amounts involved will be several billion cubic meters per year but likely less than 10 billion.
Kugler said talks are also continuing to get gas from Azerbaijan and that Israel's national infrastructures minister Binyamin Ben-Eliezer was in the former Soviet Union country this week. He said supplies could come from BP PLC (BP)-operated Shah Deniz project, where a second development phase is currently planned.
Kugler said he has not held talks with the U.K. oil giant yet but "we would be happy to speak to them." He said that during a recent visit to Shah Deniz he "was very impressed by the way BP operates" what he called "a first-class oil and gas project."
In addition, Israel is in talks with Turkmenistan and Kazakhstan, he said. All gas from the former Soviet Union would flow to Israel through a Turkish pipeline, he said.
But Kugler also said a tender process to select technical advisors for a liquefied-natural-gas terminal had just started and international companies and financial investors had already inquired about the project.