Sept. 16: Russia and Norway resolved a long-running boundary dispute in the Arctic Ocean on Wednesday that may help open a portion of the frozen sea to offshore oil and gas development.
The two countries have been negotiating their maritime boundary since 1970, dividing a vast watery realm that is pitch black in the wintertime and often covered in ice but that has also become the focus recently of intense interest from oil and natural gas companies.
The disputed area between the Novaya Zemlya archipelago on the Russian side and the Svlabard archipelago on the Norwegian side is now seen as a valuable territory in the rush to develop petroleum deposits under the Arctic Ocean. And with the polar ice cap receding as global temperatures rise, making development of the area seem far more feasible, this once-arcane dispute has taken on added urgency. The treaty signed on Wednesday by the Russian President, Dmitri A. Medvedev, and Norway’s PM, Jens Stoltenberg, settles one of several disputes by the five countries with coasts along the Arctic — Canada, Denmark, Norway, Russia and the US — and diplomats hailed it as a model for applying international law to the scramble for resources in the north. “It is not a lawless area,” Rolf Einar Fife, the chief negotiator on the Norwegian side, said.
“Rules of the game apply. The point is, the existing rules should be applied, and that is what we did today.”
The resolution of dispute, however, is unrelated to the central issues in the most contentious claim, a Russian staking out of territory that includes the North Pole. That is based on an assertion that an undersea mountain range forms part of Russia’s continental shelf. The agreement also governs drilling in any oil or gas fields that may be discovered straddling the new border. In negotiations that began in 1970, the Soviet Union had insisted on a line drawn directly north from the land border, following the meridian from the coast to the North Pole. Norway had maintained that the border should be drawn midway between the coastlines of two island chains of Svalbard, in Norway, and Novaya Zemlya, in Russia, as is typical practice in delineating maritime borders, though even the Norwegian diplomats conceded there were many exceptions.