In taking Crimea, Putin gains sea of fuel reserves

 

Russian President Vladimir Putin, right, meets with Interior Ministry Troops Commander Nikolai Rogozhkin earlier this month in the Black Sea resort of Sochi, Russia. When Putin ordered Russia to seize Crimea in March, it acquired a maritime more than three times its size with the rights to underwater resources
potentially worth trillions of dollars.

Posted: Saturday, May 17, 2014 10:56 pm

New York Times

When Russia seized Crimea in March, it acquired not just the Crimean landmass but also a maritime more than three times its size with the rights to underwater resources potentially worth trillions of dollars.
Russia portrayed the takeover as reclamation of its rightful territory, drawing no attention to the oil and gas rush that had been heating up in the Black Sea. But the move also extended Russia’s maritime boundaries, quietly giving Moscow dominion over vast oil and gas reserves while dealing a crippling blow to Ukraine’s hopes for energy independence.
Moscow did so under an international accord that gives nations sovereignty over areas up to 230 miles from their shorelines. Russia had tried, unsuccessfully, to gain access to energy resources in the same territory in a pact with Ukraine less than two years earlier.
“It’s a big deal,” said Carol R. Saivetz, a Eurasian expert in the Security Studies Program of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. “It deprives Ukraine of the possibility of developing these resources and gives them to Russia. It makes Ukraine more vulnerable to Russian pressure.”
Gilles Lericolais, the director of European and international affairs at France’s state oceanographic group, called Russia’s annexation of Crimea “so obvious” as a play for offshore riches.
Exxon Mobil, Royal Dutch Shell and other major oil companies have already explored the Black Sea, and some petroleum analysts say its potential may rival that of the North Sea.
William B.F. Ryan, a marine geologist at the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory of Columbia University, said Moscow’s Black Sea acquisition gave it what are potentially “the best” of that body’s deep oil reserves.
In Moscow, a spokesman for President Vladimir Putin said there was “no connection” between energy resources and Russia’s annexation of Crimea, adding that Russia did not even care about the oil and gas.
In Crimea, however, Russia has already taken over the Crimean arm of Ukraine’s national gas company, oil analysts said, instantly giving it exploratory gear on the Black Sea.
The global hunt for fossil fuels has increasingly gone offshore, to such places as the Atlantic Ocean off Brazil, the Gulf of Mexico and the South China Sea.
Nations divide up the world’s potentially lucrative waters according to guidelines set by the 1982 Law of the Sea Treaty. The agreement lets coastal states claim what are known as exclusive economic zones that can extend up to 200 nautical miles (or 230 statute miles) from their shores. Inside these zones, states can explore, exploit, conserve and manage deep natural resources, living and nonliving.
The countries with shores along the Black Sea see its floor as a potential energy source, mainly because of modest oil successes in shallow waters.
Just more than two years ago, the prospects for really big payoffs soared when a giant ship drilling through deep bedrock off Romania discovered a large gas field in waters more than half a mile deep.