Australia, East Timor to resume maritime boundary negotiations
Australia, East Timor to resume maritime boundary negotiations
Associated Press, Canberra
Australia and East Timor will resume talks on how to share US$30 billion n seabed oil and gas royalties in March, five months after an acrimonious breakdown in the negotiations, government officials said on Thursday.
The negotiations scheduled for March 7-9 in Australia's capital, Canberra, will be the third round in a bitter dispute over where to draw the Timor Sea maritime boundary between the two neighbors.
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.
The latest talks will focus on 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, a Foreign Affairs and Trade Department senior official said on condition of anonymity.
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 the two countries had not reached an agreement that would provide legal certainty for it to proceed as scheduled in 2007.
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.
Negotiations for such a solution proposed by East Timor broke down in October last year.
The first round of talks in April last year concentrated on drawing a permanent maritime boundary, a process Australia says would take decades.
"What we've had over the past few weeks are some very strong indications that they (East Timorese negotiators) would like to further explore a creative solution," the official told reporters.
"If East Timor comes along this time continuing to want to pursue a creative solution, then we'd be very happy to talk about that," he added.
If not, the negotiations would continue in the preliminary stages of settling the permanent boundary.