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.