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Leviathan Partners Approve Expansion Project

Chevron Corp and its local partners have agreed on a $2.36-billion final investment decision (FID) for stage 1 of a project to raise production in the Leviathan natural gas and condensate field offshore Israel. Expected to start operation in the second half of 2029, the first stage of Phase 1B aims to increase capacity to […]

Chevron Corp and its local partners have agreed on a $2.36-billion final investment decision (FID) for stage 1 of a project to raise production in the Leviathan natural gas and condensate field offshore Israel.

Expected to start operation in the second half of 2029, the first stage of Phase 1B aims to increase capacity to about 21 billion cubic meters (741.61 billion cubic feet) a year, consortium member NewMed Energy LP said in a stock filing on Friday. On August 21, 2025, it said the Energy and Infrastructures Ministry had approved Phase 1B.

Leviathan, discovered 2010 off the coast of Haifa city, went onstream December 2019 under Phase 1A, which has a capacity of about 12 Bcm per annum, according to NewMed Energy.

Chevron upstream president Clay Neff said in a separate statement issued online by the United States energy giant, “Chevron is a leading energy player in the Eastern Mediterranean, where we are focused on natural gas production and exports”.

“Our decision to invest in the expansion of Leviathan’s production capacity reflects our confidence in the future of energy in the region”, Neff added.

Neff claimed, “Pragmatic U.S. and regional energy policies are helping to strengthen energy security across the Eastern Mediterranean and foster an environment that encourages investment in the Middle East and globally”.

“This milestone demonstrates our ongoing commitment to partner with the state of Israel to develop natural gas resources and provide essential energy to millions of people in Israel, Egypt and Jordan”, said Jack Baker, Chevron managing director for the Eastern Mediterranean. 

NewMed Energy’s regulatory disclosure said, “According to the development plan, Stage One of the Expansion Project includes the drilling and completion of three additional production wells, the addition of supplementary subsea systems and expansion of the processing systems on the platform, with the aim of increasing the installed capacity of the platform up to approx. 23 Bcm per year. However, Stage One of the Expansion Project is expected to increase the total gas production capacity of the Leviathan Project up to approx. 21 Bcm per year, inter alia given restrictions of the subsea pipeline”.

The increase to about 23 Bcm would be accomplished under stage 2. The second stage is subject to regulatory approvals and agreement on further investment for a fourth pipeline between the field and the platform and more subsea installations, according to NewMed Energy. The consortium expects to make a FID on stage 2 “in the coming years”, it said.

The filing also said all conditions for the entry into force of an amended agreement signed last year between the Leviathan consortium and their current customer Blue Ocean Energy had been fulfilled. The new deal, announced by NewMed Energy August 7, 2025, raises gas exports to Egypt by a total volume of 130 Bcm.

On December 17, 2025 NewMed Energy said the consortium had received approval from Israel’s Energy and Infrastructures Ministry for the increased gas exports to Egypt.

On October 26, 2025 NewMed Energy said Israel’s Natural Gas Authority has allotted 41.8 percent of the capacity of the planned Nitzana natural gas pipeline from Israel to Egypt to the Leviathan consortium. The allocation is equivalent to about 175.56 billion British thermal units per day, according to NewMed Energy. “Chevron, on behalf of the Leviathan partners, signed an amendment to the Transmission Agreement intended to reflect the updated allocated rate”, it said.

Chevron operates Leviathan with a 39.66 percent stake through Chevron Mediterranean Ltd. NewMed Energy, owned by Israel’s Delek Group, owns 45.34 percent. Ratio Energies LP, also an Israeli company, holds 15 percent.

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Leviathan Partners Approve Expansion Project

Chevron Corp and its local partners have agreed on a $2.36-billion final investment decision (FID) for stage 1 of a project to raise production in the Leviathan natural gas and condensate field offshore Israel. Expected to start operation in the second half of 2029, the first stage of Phase 1B aims to increase capacity to about 21 billion cubic meters (741.61 billion cubic feet) a year, consortium member NewMed Energy LP said in a stock filing on Friday. On August 21, 2025, it said the Energy and Infrastructures Ministry had approved Phase 1B. Leviathan, discovered 2010 off the coast of Haifa city, went onstream December 2019 under Phase 1A, which has a capacity of about 12 Bcm per annum, according to NewMed Energy. Chevron upstream president Clay Neff said in a separate statement issued online by the United States energy giant, “Chevron is a leading energy player in the Eastern Mediterranean, where we are focused on natural gas production and exports”. “Our decision to invest in the expansion of Leviathan’s production capacity reflects our confidence in the future of energy in the region”, Neff added. Neff claimed, “Pragmatic U.S. and regional energy policies are helping to strengthen energy security across the Eastern Mediterranean and foster an environment that encourages investment in the Middle East and globally”. “This milestone demonstrates our ongoing commitment to partner with the state of Israel to develop natural gas resources and provide essential energy to millions of people in Israel, Egypt and Jordan”, said Jack Baker, Chevron managing director for the Eastern Mediterranean.  NewMed Energy’s regulatory disclosure said, “According to the development plan, Stage One of the Expansion Project includes the drilling and completion of three additional production wells, the addition of supplementary subsea systems and expansion of the processing systems on the platform, with the aim

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Power shortages, carbon capture, and AI automation: What’s ahead for data centers in 2026

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OpenAI turns to Cerebras in a mega deal to scale AI inference infrastructure

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And Microsoft isn’t the only one that is ramping up its investments into AI-enabled data centers. Rival cloud service providers are all investing in either upgrading or opening new data centers to capture a larger chunk of business from developers and users of large language models (LLMs).  In a report published in October 2024, Bloomberg Intelligence estimated that demand for generative AI would push Microsoft, AWS, Google, Oracle, Meta, and Apple would between them devote $200 billion to capex in 2025, up from $110 billion in 2023. Microsoft is one of the biggest spenders, followed closely by Google and AWS, Bloomberg Intelligence said. Its estimate of Microsoft’s capital spending on AI, at $62.4 billion for calendar 2025, is lower than Smith’s claim that the company will invest $80 billion in the fiscal year to June 30, 2025. Both figures, though, are way higher than Microsoft’s 2020 capital expenditure of “just” $17.6 billion. The majority of the increased spending is tied to cloud services and the expansion of AI infrastructure needed to provide compute capacity for OpenAI workloads. Separately, last October Amazon CEO Andy Jassy said his company planned total capex spend of $75 billion in 2024 and even more in 2025, with much of it going to AWS, its cloud computing division.

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John Deere unveils more autonomous farm machines to address skill labor shortage

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2025 playbook for enterprise AI success, from agents to evals

Join our daily and weekly newsletters for the latest updates and exclusive content on industry-leading AI coverage. Learn More 2025 is poised to be a pivotal year for enterprise AI. The past year has seen rapid innovation, and this year will see the same. This has made it more critical than ever to revisit your AI strategy to stay competitive and create value for your customers. From scaling AI agents to optimizing costs, here are the five critical areas enterprises should prioritize for their AI strategy this year. 1. Agents: the next generation of automation AI agents are no longer theoretical. In 2025, they’re indispensable tools for enterprises looking to streamline operations and enhance customer interactions. Unlike traditional software, agents powered by large language models (LLMs) can make nuanced decisions, navigate complex multi-step tasks, and integrate seamlessly with tools and APIs. At the start of 2024, agents were not ready for prime time, making frustrating mistakes like hallucinating URLs. They started getting better as frontier large language models themselves improved. “Let me put it this way,” said Sam Witteveen, cofounder of Red Dragon, a company that develops agents for companies, and that recently reviewed the 48 agents it built last year. “Interestingly, the ones that we built at the start of the year, a lot of those worked way better at the end of the year just because the models got better.” Witteveen shared this in the video podcast we filmed to discuss these five big trends in detail. Models are getting better and hallucinating less, and they’re also being trained to do agentic tasks. Another feature that the model providers are researching is a way to use the LLM as a judge, and as models get cheaper (something we’ll cover below), companies can use three or more models to

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OpenAI’s red teaming innovations define new essentials for security leaders in the AI era

Join our daily and weekly newsletters for the latest updates and exclusive content on industry-leading AI coverage. Learn More OpenAI has taken a more aggressive approach to red teaming than its AI competitors, demonstrating its security teams’ advanced capabilities in two areas: multi-step reinforcement and external red teaming. OpenAI recently released two papers that set a new competitive standard for improving the quality, reliability and safety of AI models in these two techniques and more. The first paper, “OpenAI’s Approach to External Red Teaming for AI Models and Systems,” reports that specialized teams outside the company have proven effective in uncovering vulnerabilities that might otherwise have made it into a released model because in-house testing techniques may have missed them. In the second paper, “Diverse and Effective Red Teaming with Auto-Generated Rewards and Multi-Step Reinforcement Learning,” OpenAI introduces an automated framework that relies on iterative reinforcement learning to generate a broad spectrum of novel, wide-ranging attacks. Going all-in on red teaming pays practical, competitive dividends It’s encouraging to see competitive intensity in red teaming growing among AI companies. When Anthropic released its AI red team guidelines in June of last year, it joined AI providers including Google, Microsoft, Nvidia, OpenAI, and even the U.S.’s National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), which all had released red teaming frameworks. Investing heavily in red teaming yields tangible benefits for security leaders in any organization. OpenAI’s paper on external red teaming provides a detailed analysis of how the company strives to create specialized external teams that include cybersecurity and subject matter experts. The goal is to see if knowledgeable external teams can defeat models’ security perimeters and find gaps in their security, biases and controls that prompt-based testing couldn’t find. What makes OpenAI’s recent papers noteworthy is how well they define using human-in-the-middle

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