Israel ’s fledgling natural gas industry was rattled on Tuesday over a threat by the country’s antitrust regulator to break an American-Israeli group’s hold on the country’s gas resources. Israeli officials and the antitrust regulator have said that they are concerned that Noble Energy, a Houston-based oil company, and its partners, Delek Drilling and Avner Oil Exploration, had a lock on Israeli gas production. Noble and its partners produce nearly all of Israel’s gas from an offshore field called Tamar, and that gas is used to generate about half of the country’s electric power. They are also developing an even larger field, Leviathan . Together, Nobel estimates that the Leviathan and Tamar fields hold more than 800 billion cubic meters of gas, enough to meet current Israeli demand for about a century. With such a wealth of gas, the companies and the government are backing plans to […]