Dividing the Waters
Wednesday, 15. August 2007, 07:53:33
Who owns the North pole? See my note on the Lomonosov Ridge.
Argentina Aims to Expand Its Maritime Frontier. Apparently there is a the race to divide the globe's remaining waters for nation's benefits. The Caspian Sea is more hotly contested than the Arctic and Antarctica.
The five countries bordering the Caspian Sea, namely Azerbaijan, the Islamic Republic of Iran, Kazakhstan, Turkmenistan and the Russian Federation, have been negotiating for years to establish their maritime borders, but remain deadlocked.
The Caspian may hold nearly as much oil as the Persian Gulf.
With the exception of the Islamic Republic of Iran, the countries surrounding the Caspian came into being in 1992 - since the collapse of the Soviet Union. The Caspian is completely landlocked, causing a controversy over whether it is a sea or a lake. The Caspian is the world's largest enclosed body of water, and the 1982 U.N. Convention on the Law of the Sea defines it as "a special inner sea". The last document to delineate the Caspian's legal status was a 1940 Soviet-Iranian treaty, giving each signatory an exclusive right of fishing in its coastal waters up to a limit of 10 nautical miles, and stating that the Caspian belongs to Iran and to the Soviet Union.
The big question is whether the national sectors should be determined by length of coastline or a proportional sharing of 20 percent among the five new nations that in 1991 replaced the Soviet Union and Iran? Iran could be left with as little as only 13 percent of the seabed if the division is based on the the coastline.
Russia controls the bulk of existing pipelines that allow Russian, Kazakh and Turkmen oil and gas to be exported westward, and the Kremlin is sole owner of the Volga-Don Canal.
Iran controls the shortest route to the Persian Gulf and eastward to the Asian markets.
See also my post on the Caspian Sea
Argentina Aims to Expand Its Maritime Frontier. Apparently there is a the race to divide the globe's remaining waters for nation's benefits. The Caspian Sea is more hotly contested than the Arctic and Antarctica.
The five countries bordering the Caspian Sea, namely Azerbaijan, the Islamic Republic of Iran, Kazakhstan, Turkmenistan and the Russian Federation, have been negotiating for years to establish their maritime borders, but remain deadlocked.
The Caspian may hold nearly as much oil as the Persian Gulf.
With the exception of the Islamic Republic of Iran, the countries surrounding the Caspian came into being in 1992 - since the collapse of the Soviet Union. The Caspian is completely landlocked, causing a controversy over whether it is a sea or a lake. The Caspian is the world's largest enclosed body of water, and the 1982 U.N. Convention on the Law of the Sea defines it as "a special inner sea". The last document to delineate the Caspian's legal status was a 1940 Soviet-Iranian treaty, giving each signatory an exclusive right of fishing in its coastal waters up to a limit of 10 nautical miles, and stating that the Caspian belongs to Iran and to the Soviet Union.
The big question is whether the national sectors should be determined by length of coastline or a proportional sharing of 20 percent among the five new nations that in 1991 replaced the Soviet Union and Iran? Iran could be left with as little as only 13 percent of the seabed if the division is based on the the coastline.
Russia controls the bulk of existing pipelines that allow Russian, Kazakh and Turkmen oil and gas to be exported westward, and the Kremlin is sole owner of the Volga-Don Canal.
Iran controls the shortest route to the Persian Gulf and eastward to the Asian markets.
See also my post on the Caspian Sea
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http://www.energy-daily.com/reports/Division_Of_The_Caspian_999.html
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http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_qa3739/is_199708/ai_n8780577
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http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m3159/is_8_222/ai_77876364
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