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I srael is very much an “island” in terms of electricity supply. For political reasons, its grid is not connected with those of its neighbors. Until recently, it had little in the way of domestic deposits of fossil fuels to generate electricity. Th us, Israel relies on imported coal as the primary fuel for base-load electric-power generation: In 2007, coal was used to generate about 70 percent of Israel’s electricity. Most of the rest of its base-load generation (20 percent) now comes from natural gas, increasingly from imports through a natural-gas pipeline from Egypt. Recently, Israel discovered large, domestic off shore natural-gas deposits. Should Israel shift away from imported coal and toward natural gas (both imported and domestic) as a way to meet future demand for electricity from its growing economy? Because of long lead times in constructing base-load capacity, Israel must make expensive, momentous investment decisions in the near future while considering likely future levels of demand, the costs and availability of sources of fuel supply, security of fuel supply, future development of alternative technologies, reliability, environmental eff ects, and land use. All these factors are fraught with deep uncertainty. Th is study assessed the opportunities and risks Israel faces in shifting to a greater reliance on domestic and imported natural gas by applying an innovative, quantitative robust decisionmaking (RDM) approach to the central question of how large a role natural gas should play in Israel’s energy balance. Rather than relying on the typical method of optimizing plans around a “most likely” or small number of scenarios, RDM helps planners discover robust strategies— strategies likely to achieve satisfactory levels of success across a large range of plausible futures. When the future cannot be forecasted with confi dence, RDM helps planners examine the available alternatives and ask which would be best to choose. Working with a future time frame of 2030, the study considered strategies for natural-gas use that would lead to diff erent levels and patterns of consumption of natural gas and then considered strategies for ensuring that there will be enough natural gas to satisfy future levels of demand.