An aerial view of the Israeli gas rig Tamar. Photo: Albatross Aerial photography/Nobel Energy/FLASH90.

Noble Energy said on Saturday that the company preferred selling natural gas from Israel’s Leviathan field to the country’s neighbors, such as Egypt or Jordan, Globes reported.

CEO Charles Davidson said construction of a liquefied natural gas (LNG) facility for the sale of gas to the Far East would be curtailed because a gas pipeline infrastructure in the region already exists, which makes regional sales cheaper.

“We will be able to market more gas regionally at lower capital cost because all of these regional markets are basically using pipes, and in some instances they’re connecting the pipes that already exist,” said Davidson, according to Globes.

He did not, however, rule out the possibility of the LNG plant, saying, “We still believe we’ll have a component of LNG in there, but it will probably not be as many trains. It could be floating LNG, or it could be LNG over in Cyprus.”

Israeli natural gas is saving the country’s economy $300 million a month, a figure that could reach as high as $1 billion, Israeli Energy Minister Silvan Shalom told Bloomberg News earlier this month.

In 2010 Noble Energy, an American energy company, signed an agreement with Israel’s Delek group to develop the Tamar and Leviathan gas fields.