Oxy Chief Leads Private Group : Hammer Plans to Search for Oil Deposits in Israel

Los Angeles oilman Armand Hammer celebrated his 90th birthday here Tuesday with a pledge to do all he can to give Israel a present--its own petroleum supply.

After signing a lease covering exploration rights for an area equal to more than one-third of the country’s total land mass, Hammer, whose birthday actually was in May, said: “I’m determined to find oil for Israel. I think when the Lord put oil in the world, he didn’t mean to keep it from Israel and give it all to the Arabs.”

Hammer is chairman of Los Angeles-based Occidental Petroleum, but his deal with Israel is on behalf of a group of private investors. Occidental “is giving us advice and help,” he added.

A lot of dry holes have been bored in Israel, the veteran oilman conceded in an interview, but he said Occidental geologists are “very optimistic” about prospects for an offshore site about 10 miles west of Tel Aviv.

“None of them have gone deep enough,” Hammer said of previous test wells. He said a drilling ship will be in place by later this year to begin a 17,000-foot well beneath the Mediterranean, the deepest ever attempted here.

Reluctant to Search

Hammer said recently completed seismological tests have identified a structure deep beneath the sea floor that may hold up to 1 billion barrels of oil--a “giant” field in industry parlance.

“If it wasn’t in Israel, every oil company in the world would want to take a shot at it,” he said of the structure.

Israel has no oil of its own, and oil companies have been reluctant to help look for it here because of their business ties with the Arab nations, most of which are technically in a state of war with the Jewish state.

Israel buys most of its oil from Egypt under agreements worked out between the two nations in connection with their 1979 peace treaty, the only such pact between Israel and an Arab nation. The oil comes from the Sinai Peninsula, which Israel controlled between 1967 and its return to Egypt under terms of the peace treaty.

Hammer said the first test well at the offshore site should be completed during the first quarter of 1989 at a cost of $11 million. About one-third of that will be financed by the Israeli government and the balance by Hammer’s investment group. Later, he said, a second and possibly a third well may be necessary to confirm and define any oil deposit.

Aided Israel in ‘70s

Israeli officials feted Hammer lavishly during this belated celebration of his birthday. He met Tuesday morning with President Chaim Herzog and was the guest of honor at a lunch given by Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir and Foreign Minister Shimon Peres. In between he had a private visit with former Prime Minister Menachem Begin, becoming one of the very few people to see the ailing former leader since he resigned and went into seclusion nearly five years ago.

Hammer was honored Tuesday night at a “birthday dinner” sponsored by the Tel Aviv Foundation.

In an interview taped for Israeli Television, the first question to Hammer, a Jew, was: “How come you started to help Israeli people at such a late stage in your life?”

The oilman responded that he had used his well-known Soviet connections on Israel’s behalf as early as 1973 when the late Prime Minister Golda Meir asked him to aid Soviet Jews wishing to emigrate.