Natural gas has been discovered at the Dolphin I exploratory well, in the eastern Mediterranean waters 110 kilometers west of Haifa, near the Leviathan site.

The well operator, Texas-based Noble Energy Inc., owns 39.66% of the license.  Delek Group Ltd. and Avner Oil and Gas LP each own 22.67%, and Ratio Oil Exploration (1992) LP owns 15%.

The same group made the world's largest off-shore discovery of the decade last year at the Leviathan site, estimated to contain 16 trillion cubic feet (tcf) of natural gas.

Preliminary findings showed that Dolphin 1, located in the Hanna license, contains some 550 billion cubic feet (15.7 billion cubic meters) of natural gas. The reservoir is much smaller than the nearby Tamar field discovered in 2009.

The gas-bearing strata is located 4,400 meters deep in the Tamar sands, at a depth of 1,560 meters in the Mediterranean.

It is considered the most promising of three geologic structures within the Hanna license, and is the group's sixth natural gas discovery in Israeli waters. Nevertheless, the group reported it was still to early to determine the size of the gas layer and the quality of the reservoir.