A US energy exploration company announced on Sunday that it had discovered yet another substantial deposit of natural gas off the Israeli coast.

Noble Energy said exploratory drilling at the Dalit-1 site about 37 miles off the coast of the Israeli city of Hadera had yielded results far sooner than expected, raising speculations that the deposit could be far larger than hoped.

Earlier this year, one of Noble Energy's exploratory wells off the coast of Haifa discovered three enormous underwater gas reservoirs.

One of Noble's Israeli partners said the earlier find could be the largest natural gas find in history, and would transform the Israeli economy for the better for decades to come.