Potential Artic oil reserves

Leslie Moore Mira, senior writer, Oilgram News, speaks with US Navy Captain Patrick Neher, director of the Navy's International and Operational Law Office of the Judge Advocate General, and Paul Kelly, an energy and ocean consultant, member of the API's executive upstream committee and a retired former senior vice president at driller Rowan Companies. They discussed the strategic importance of the international Law of the Sea Treaty to the US and the politics behind its repeated failure to win passage by US leaders.

The Arctic is thought to hold billions of barrels of oil and billions of cubic meters of gas reserves, and claims on the region have prompted much controversy. The melting ice-cap has opened up shipping lanes, but it is on the potential reserves of oil and gas at the North Pole that most of the attention has been focused.

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Created: August 25, 2008

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