Ministers decide to end petrochemical activities within decade, promote national projects area; environmental groups slam government for lack of timetable and budget
Sue Surkes is The Times of Israel s environment reporter.
View of Haifa s oil refineries and other industrial areas, on May 5, 2017. (Yaniv Nadav/Flash90/File)
A top-level committee of officials set up within the Prime Minister’s Office recommended on Monday the closure “as soon as possible, and within no more than a decade,” of the polluting Bazan Group Oil Refineries in northern Israel’s Haifa Bay and its oil storage complex in nearby Kiryat Haim, as well as the transfer of Haifa Chemicals, a fertilizer plant, from there to the Negev desert in the south.
It issued its “draft government strategic plan” for public comment, before formally advising the government. It said that the closure of the plants had to be conditioned on maintaining the country’s energy security.