WASHINGTON — Israel is greeting news of an oil discovery with a simple message to prospectors: The Dead Sea is open for business.

That was the reaction this week from the Jewish state’s infrastructure minister upon hearing the news that the Israeli company Ginko had struck black gold. “It is an encouraging sign,” Benyamin Ben-Eliezer told the Jerusalem Post. “We are checking the entire area and we are opening the whole region for drilling. We will give our full support to any company that wants to try.”

Compared with the oil fields of Venezuela and Saudi Arabia, the discovery near the Dead Sea is quite small. But it marks a significant deposit of oil and natural gas for Israel, which has been lured in the past by the potential of oil deposits off the coast of Gaza and elsewhere, only to find relatively dry holes.

Indeed, Ginko first began exploring the area in 1997 but abandoned the project because the price of oil was too low. With the benchmark rising, the company restarted exploration.

Speaking on Israel’s Channel 10 News on Wednesday, a Ginko official, Eli Tenenbaum, said, “We noticed that the pressure in the area was very high, and when we opened the tap, oil started flowing freely for several minutes.”

Mr. Tenenbaum said the reserve could hold up to $300 million worth of oil, or 6 million barrels.

While that figure may seem high, it is minuscule compared with Israel’s overall daily consumption, which now is at 200,000 barrels of oil.

The chief economist for the American Petroleum Institute, John Felmy, told The New York Sun yesterday that the best-case scenario for the patch is a yield of between 100 and 150 barrels a day. By way of comparison, Saudi Arabia produces more than 9 million barrels a day. “This deposit is not significant,” the economist said. “It’s a rounding error in comparison to Saudi production.”

Nonetheless, Mr. Felmy conceded that the discovery could lead to more deposits. “It is a good sign you have found a resource there. Anytime you find a wildcat deposit, there may be more beyond it,” he said. “It’s a puzzling thing about the Middle East. You see oil in a lot of places, but you did not find it in Israel. Until you explore the country with modern techniques, you don’t know if Israel has oil or not.”

Mr. Tenenbaum said his prospectors found signs of oil near the original hole, a sign that more oil awaits. He also said his company drilled an area near the Dead Sea to a depth of 1.2 miles. But Mr. Felmy noted that new drilling technologies allow for much deeper exploration.

A former executive director of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, Morris Amitay, said he was not excited about the news from the Dead Sea. “Every few years there is another announcement of a big oil discovery in Israel, and every time it turns out unfortunately not to be true,” he said. “As far as I know, given the geological formations in the area, there will not be any significant discoveries of oil.”

If the optimists are correct, however, and more oil is discovered near the Dead Sea, Israel may be in a position to address some of its long-standing energy concerns. Since 1978, when Prime Minister Begin signed the Camp David Accords and ceded the Sinai Peninsula and its oil wells to Egypt, Jerusalem has had scarcely any oil of its own. However, during the Camp David summit, Israel forged a separate arrangement that committed America to provide Israel with oil should the Jewish state be blockaded or frozen out of the world market.

An Israeli official said yesterday that since Camp David, his country has taken steps to diversify its oil purchases. “The world is a different place than it was 30 years ago,” the official, who requested anonymity, said. “Today there is more oil in the world and we can buy it from different places.”