Partners in the Aphrodite natural gas field, which include Israel’s NewMed Energy, announced on Sunday that they have started drilling an appraisal well at the field offshore Cyprus.

Israel’s NewMed Energy, formerly Delek Drilling (part of Yitzhak Tshuva’s Delek Group), which owns a 30% stake in the Aphrodite field said drilling the appraisal well is expected to take about three months. Other partners in the Aphrodite gas field, which holds an estimated 124 billion cubic meters of gas, are US energy giant Chevron and Shell, who each own a 35% share.

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Discovered in 2011, the Aphrodite natural gas field is located about 170 kilometers (some 105 miles) south of Limassol in Cyprus and 30 kilometers (some 18 miles) northwest of Israel’s Leviathan gas reservoir, one of the world’s largest deep-water gas discoveries. Earlier this year, partners in the Leviathan field — NewMed Energy, Chevron and Ratio Oil Corp — announced plans to to boost annual gas production and exports in 2025 to meet growing demand. Currently, a maximum capacity of up to 1.2 billion cubic feet of natural gas per day, or 12 billion cubic meters per year, is piped up from the Leviathan reservoir for the supply and sale of gas to Israel, Egypt, and Jordan.

Read more: Times of Israel