Eye on the Enemy: Gas Signals in Samson’s Exploration Field
ــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ
Gas Signals in Samson's Exploration Field
News1.co.il
After the completion of exploratory drilling, which reached a depth of 4.4 km
below sea level, the companies concluded that main signals of natural gas have been discovered.
The target layer, which includes gas, has been taken due to the implementation of a reasonable exploration done by cable, which involved electrical seismic and magnetic tests.
Following these data, the exploration companies decided to do production tests that are expected to start in the coming days and last about 35 days. The completion expenses that include the production tests and the preparations for the exploration of the needs of future production are estimated at $ 34 million.
According to estimates from the exploration company, ATP, the maximum rate of
gas flow in the production test is estimated at 40 MMSCFD.
Samson's license extends to an area of 400 square kilometers in the Mediterranean Sea, about 92 km west of the shores of Ashkelon. During last March, the companies received views from a reliable US estimator who estimates the amount of gas of the license to be (1.53.34 TCF), i.e. about one third of Tamar field exploration.
A New System Threatening Gaza's Tunnels
Ma'ariv
The "Israeli" army is reassuring that there is a solution to one of the most difficult and disturbing challenges it is forced to confront, especially at the borders of Gaza: "probe Hzak" (strong man) is a technology system that can detect Palestinian underground tunnels used to smuggle of weapons and wounded people into the sector.
Recently, a final exercise was implemented in Karam Shalom, close to the place where "Gilad Shalit" was kidnapped in 2006, in which the elite unit fighters belonging to the Corps of Engineers played the role of Palestinians diggers in the tunnels", and the new system, which is the result of technological development in the ground forces, succeeded in detecting them.
During the exercise, the fighters of "Ihlam unit" dug a series of tunnels at different depths using different means adopted by the Palestinians. A senior officer said, that "The results were impressive." 3 graduates from project "Telviot" are behind developing this system. These three held responsibility of this difficult task only two years ago.
Moreover, deputy chief of staff allocated an amount of money to fund the development process, and by the end of next year, the system will be fixed along 10 km on the borders of the strip. "We think we have found a solution for the tunnels' issue, and their threat will be eliminated soon", the senior officer added. Colonel Tal Harmouni said that the underground threat is constantly bothering us, "Hamas is digging tunnels that reach "Israel" to abduct soldiers," adding that the "Israeli" army response regarding this will be in through the intelligence field.
"Solving the tunnels' problem keeps on failing", wrote the state comptroller in 2007 after the death of 17 soldiers because of the tunnels, directly and indirectly. "The confrontation was wrong, operation wise, technological wise, and intelligence wise". In the comptroller's report, 3 samples of civil and military systems, which the army presented, were listed, but they didn't meet the conditions.
The technique which operates the new system is secretive, but the three developers have well-tested the failed techniques and built "geophone" systems (detects underground vibrations) that will be planted at 1.5 m depth within the ground. These systems might disclose energy waves within the ground, for they contain sound devices taken from various sensor systems used at the navy, such as the devices that locate oil fields.
"This is the creation of a system that knows how to alert about a digging process effectively," the senior officer explained. As for the success of the experiment, the deputy chief of staff, Major General, Yair Naveh, gave the green light to start the development process, and next month a bid will be held to pick the manufacturing company.
In the first phase, which may end up in the end of 2013, the system will operate over ten kilometers at the borders of the sector, and after that will be completed up to 54 km. The total cost, including the development stage, would amount to about 200 million shekels.
ــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ
"IDF" Tests Siren for Rogue Non-conventional Missiles
Jeursalem Post-By YAAKOV KATZ
Concern mounts in "Israel" over possibility that Syria's chemical weapons will fall into "rogue hands."
As concern mounts in "Israel" over the possibility that Syria's chemical weapons will fall into "rogue hands", the "IDF" recently tested a new air raid siren that will notify the public of incoming missiles carrying non-conventional warheads.
The possibility of using two different sirens during a future conflict - one for conventional missiles and the other for missiles carrying non-conventional warheads - was first revealed in "The Jerusalem" Post two years ago after it came up following that summer's nationwide civil defense exercises.
At the time, the "Home Front Command" decided to shelve the plan, but several weeks ago - likely as result of the ongoing uprising in Syria - it renewed tests of the siren.
Since the Second Lebanon War in 2006, the "IDF" Home Front Command has
invested in improving "Israeli" warning systems and has doubled the number of sirens stationed throughout "Israel" to a whopping 3,100.
While "Israeli" radars can detect missile launches, they are not capable of determining if a missile is carrying a nonconventional warhead.
"This would be based on intelligence but there is no reason for people to put on their gas masks for every missile that is fired into "Israel" if they don't have to," a senior "Home Front Command" officer explained.
As a result, it is possible that if war were to break out with Syria, which has a large arsenal of chemical weapons, the "IDF" would maintain a stringent policy of airing the non-conventional siren for every missile launched from Syria. On the other hand, a regular siren would sound for missiles launched from Lebanon.
Syria is believed to have one of the most extensive chemical weapons arsenal in the world which reportedly includes Sarin, VX and mustard gas.
"Israel" is concerned that Syria's chemical weapons could possibly fall into rogue hands. This worry stems from intelligence obtained by the West which indicates that advanced conventional military platforms have already been moved out of Syria by Hizbullah.
Source: Hebrew papers, Translated and Edited by moqawama.org
