Canada makes Arctic claim

Earlier this month, Canada made a partial submission to the UN Commission on the Limits of the Continental Shelf to extend its maritime borders in the Arctic to encompass an extra half a million square miles of territory, including the North Pole. This move has angered some of the other four states who lay claim to a portion of the Arctic, including Russia, Greenland, US and Denmark. Claims to the region will become crucial geopolitical considerations for these states in the coming years, as the area north of the Arctic Circle has an estimated 90 billion barrels of undiscovered oil according to the US Geological Survey.

Canada's Foreign Minister John Baird said last week that, as part of its submission, his government was making a claim on the Lomonosov Ridge, a submerged mountain-range between Ellesmere Island, Canadian territory, and Russia's Siberian coast. Russia, which has historically named the Ridge as part of its territory, responded to Canada's move by increasing its military presence in the Arctic. President Vladimir Putin has reasserted that the region is key to his nation's interests and that he would build up infrastructure in an area that has seen a Russian retreat in recent years.

Despite the charged, publicly-iterated political rhetoric from Canada and Russia, according to researchers from the International Boundaries Research Unit in Durham University, teams of scientists from both nations are working together on the frozen region, and in reality, there is a great deal more co-operation than their leaders let on. Nevertheless, it is likely that Canada's claim is largely political, more than anything else, given that there are no hydrocarbons reserves at the North Pole.

Canada signed the UNCLOS on 10 December 1982 and ratified it on the 7 November 2003, entering into force exactly a month later. As of August of this year, 165 countries plus the European Union have signed the Convention, with the notable exception of US.

US proposal for Lebanon Israel maritime boundary

It was reported this week that the US Deputy Assistant Secretary for Energy Diplomacy, Amos Hochstein, was in Beirut recently to propose a new solution to Lebanon's maritime boundary dispute with Israel. He suggested a blue line be drawn around the contested area, so that no hydrocarbons exploration activity would take place until a comprehensive and binding resolution between both parties had been reached. A similar blue line was drawn in June 2000 by the UN to demarcate the contested land border between the two Levantine states.

The tangled maritime border has contributed to rising tensions over potential natural gas riches in the eastern Mediterranean. The US Geological Survey estimated in 2010 that the Levant Basin may contain two billion barrels of oil and well over one hundred trillion cubic feet of gas. Neither Israel nor Lebanon has been willing to compromise on its territorial claims for fear of missing out on these much-needed oil and gas reserves.

Earlier this year, Israel's Arab northern neighbour announced a pre-qualification round for offshore exploration, with scores of IOCs showing real interest in potential drilling contracts in Block 9, adjacent to the contested area. Israel responded by announcing its intention to exploit the Karish-1 offshore field near Block 9. Both sides are wary of the other siphoning off these reserves through various horizontal and diagonal drilling techniques. This proposal by the US may go some way to easing tensions in the short-term, however, the underlying issue remains that Israel and Lebanon have not formally demarcated their maritime borders.

In 2007, a bilateral agreement was signed between Lebanon and Cyprus on the delimitation of the former's Exclusive Economic Zone but, in protest at the 2010 bilateral agreement between Cyprus and Israel, it has never been ratified by the Lebanese government. This dispute, as well as Turkish political pressure on Lebanon, has also held up the ratification of the 2007 Lebanese-Cypriot agreement, despite the existence of clauses in these agreements to accommodate for amendments.

The disputed area totals 874km². Israel plots its maritime border with Cyprus as beginning at Point 1, which coincided with the final point demarcated between Lebanon and Cyprus. Beirut argues, however, that this final coordinate was deliberately chosen because it was in uncontested Lebanese waters and that the de jure border should actually lie 17km further at Point 23.

For further information on maritime borders in the eastern Mediterranean, please visit our Border Focus page.

Offshore exploration tender issued by CNOOC

China's leading offshore oil producer, the state-run CNOOC, has issued a tender on the company website yesterday inviting IOCs to bid to participate in the exploration of 25 oil and gas blocks, the majority of which are located in the South and East China Sea. The blocks cover a total area of 102,577km², include 10 highly attractive deep-water patches and represent the largest offshore tender offered (in terms of real size) by China since the 1990s.

The announcement is the latest in a series of moves by China to assert its claims in the strategically-located South and East China Sea by launching tenders for oil and gas blocks, as well as frequent diplomatic manoeuvres and shows of military strength. Tellingly, the Chinese President Xi Jinping and Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe did not formally meet at the Asia-Pacific Economic Co-operation summit last week, following an escalation of tensions between the two Asian giants over the sovereignty of the Senkaku/Diaoyu Islands in the East China Sea. Last week, Abe made a defiant statement claiming that Japan would not make any concessions on its territorial integrity.

Two of the newly announced blocks, 33/02 and 41/14 in the Lishui Sag area, are located in close proximity to the disputed Islands, whose purchase by Japan last year reignited the centuries-old question over ownership. The state-run company is also thought to be investing $5 billion in developing submerged gas fields in the East China Sea, with the possibility of tapping gas deposits in Japanese waters through diagonal and horizontal drilling methods. The company has already come under scrutiny this month from Green Dragon Gas, which claims that CNOOC breached production sharing contracts by drilling wells on its licences without notification.

In June, China angered Vietnam by inviting IOCs to jointly participate in the development of nine blocks in the waters around Hainan, blocks which Hanoi considers overlap into their maritime territory. CNOOC's usual operating procedure is to team up with foreign firms during the exploration phase, but holds the right to take a 51% in the block once a commercial find is made. PetroVietnam was involved in a dispute with its northern neighbour last December when Beijing accused it of 'unilateral oil and gas exploration activities'.

For more background on the China-Japan Islands dispute, please refer to our previous news story dated 30 September 2013.