ENI expects to drill for Cyprus gas next year

Italy’s ENI will start exploratory drilling for natural gas off Cyprus in the second half of 2014, its chief executive said last year.
ENI and joint venture partner KOGAS of Korea signed an exploration and production-sharing contract with the government in early 2013 to search for hydrocarbons in three offshore areas.
Paolo Scaroni, ENI's chief executive officer, said the company would launch an exploratory drilling in one offshore block next year.
"We are focussed on gas, and we believe it is gas, but it might very well be oil as well," Scaroni told reporters after meeting senior government officials and the president.
France's Total has also signed a production-sharing contract for offshore exploration with the Cypriot government and has shown interest to build a second train in the land-based LNG liquefaction plant for which Noble Energy and Israel’s Delek and Avner have signed an MoU.
The U.S. Geological Survey has estimated that the Levant Basin, which lies largely in Cypriot and Israeli waters, holds around 3.5 trln cubic metres of recoverable gas.