Chevron just purchased Noble Energy, reportedly for $13 billion. It is the biggest acquisition in the oil industry since COVID-19 began. Noble Energy is an oil and gas drilling company based in Houston, where I lived nearly 40 years. They were financially troubled, being in debt $8 billion. Of course, it was largely because the oil industry has been very depressed for years now. But they have some good drilling rights assets.
Interestingly, Chevron just passed Exxon-Mobil as the largest oil company in the world, that is, if you negate Saudi-Aramco, which only became a public company last year.
I used to be an investor in Noble Energy. It was partly because of their main asset–drilling rights to undersea natural gas deposits (and perhaps oil deposits yet to be discovered) deep down under the seabed in the Eastern Mediterranean Sea, most of which belong to the State of Israel. Noble was developing these tracts. This prize has made Israel not only energy independent, but an exporter of natural gas as well. No one had any idea that this would happen until a small drilling company discovered natural gas in this area at the end of the 20th century.
This Chevron acquisition of Noble further assures that a major oil company will exploit these gas fields to the ultimate, furthering Israel’s financial interest. This is all the more reason why Palestinians should do as I recently blogged, and have been constantly saying for many years, that Palestinians should abandon their age-old two-state solution for a Palestinian state in the Gaza Strip and the separated West Bank–which has not happened now in seventy years of trying, and I don’t think will ever happen–and refocus on having a Palestinian state in a very expanded Gaza Strip along the coastland. (See my article “Eastern Mediterranean Mineral Rights of the New Philistia Proposal,” published seven years ago.) Such a Palestinian state could have an eighty-mile coast, equal to that of Israel’s due to a land-swap deal, and Palestinians could realize some serious financial income from offshore gas deposits just as Israel is now doing. See this solution elucidated more fully at my website. See my book, Palestine Is Coming: The Revival of Ancient Philistia (1990).
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