Navitas Petroleum LP (TASE: NVPT), an energy exploration partnership headed by its founder Gideon Tadmor, notified the Tel Aviv Stock Exchange today that it was replacing two "contractors in breach" that had decided not to work on the partnership’s new maritime project, Sea Lion, near the Falkland Islands (or Malvinas to the Argentinians) in the South Atlantic. Navitas mentions a militant speech by the president of Argentina, Javier Milei, a month ago, in which he threatened sanctions against those involved in the Sea Lion project.
Navitas said that it was continuing to develop the project with the full support of the Falklands and UK governments, and that it did not see any material adverse impact on it. Investors, however, and the price of Navitas’s participation units is down by more than 5% in today’s session, and by 15% in the past month. Navitas has nevertheless been a strong investment, with a return of 290% over the past three years. Its current market cap is NIS 13.8 billion.
Unlike Navitas’s Shenandoah Project in the Gulf of Mexico, which is in US economic waters and which took advantage of the opportunity presented by the low in oil prices at the start of the decade, Sea Lion is dependent on the UK government. The UK holds the Falkland Islands as a distant colony, which in the 1980s it defended against an Argentinian invasion. Milei has revived historical claims to Argentinian sovereignty over the islands, which puts Navitas’s ambitious project in the heart of an international dispute.
The reason that Navitas is determined to proceed with the Sea Lion project, in which it has a 65% stake, is its economic value. According to a presentation by the partnership for the second quarter of this year, Sea Lion accounts for more than half of the $9.73 billion that Navitas expects to generate from sales of oil from its various projects. The budget for the Sea Lion project is $1.8 billion. Production is supposed to begin in March 2028. The reservoir will produce 35 million barrels of oil a day.
Published by Globes, Israel business news - en.globes.co.il - on October 5, 2026.
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