Australia, East Timor resume oil and gas talks
Australia, East Timor resume oil and gas talks
Associated Press, Canberra
Australia and East Timor resumed talks on Monday on how to carve
up billions of dollars worth of oil and gas under the seabed that
divides one of the Asia-Pacific's richest nations from one of the
region's poorest.
Three days of talks got under way in the Australian capital,
Canberra, five months after the acrimonious collapse of the last
round of negotiations.
At stake is an estimated US$30 billion in seabed oil and gas
royalties.
The negotiations are the third round in a bitter dispute over
where to draw the Timor Sea maritime boundary between the two
neighbors -- a line that ultimately will decide how much of the
revenue each nation gets.
East Timor wants the border in the middle of the 600
kilometers of sea separating the two.
However, Australia wants the same boundary it agreed with
Indonesia, which occupied East Timor from 1975-1999. In some
places, that boundary is just 150 kilometers from East Timor's
coast.
Australian officials said last month the latest talks will
seek a "creative solution" that would enable the $5 billion
Greater Sunrise gas field -- the largest in the Timor Sea -- to
be tapped without the permanent boundary question being settled.
Woodside Petroleum Ltd., one of the companies hoping to pump
oil and gas out of the region, shelved the Greater Sunrise
project last year because Australia and East Timor had failed to
broker a revenue-sharing deal.
Australia insists that any solution must provide Woodside and
its partners with legal certainty to proceed and must postpone
any agreement on a permanent maritime boundary for at least 50
years, the official said.
Postponing the boundary agreement is aimed at ensuring that
the agreement remains in place until the seabed energy reserves
are exhausted.
The East Timorese got support Monday from a delegation
including a Catholic bishop and the leader of Australia's Greens
political party Sen. Bob Brown, which said it wanted to take part
in the talks to ensure the tiny half-island nation is treated
fairly.
"The majority of Australians want our government to offer a
fair deal that reflects East Timor's rightful entitlement under
current international law," Bishop Hilton Deakin said in a
statement.