Some Observations On North Sea Developments Relative To Canada''s East Coast*

Abstract

Introduction This paper originally was in the form of an address to the Mining Society of Nova Scotia, 19th Annual Fall Meeting, Sydney, Nova Scotia, November 20, 1982. In this presentation, the paper was entitled " Some North Sea Experiences With Offshore Hydrocarbon Developments ". History The experience of North Sea countries with oil and gas is, of course, very recent. Since at least the period of the Roman invasion of Britain, the North Sea has been a centre of trade and its principal natural resource has been fish. To the Anglo-Saxons in Britain, the North Sea brought the feared Norse hordes who were less than welcome guests in their country (actually kingdoms). During the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, the North Sea was the centre of trade in Northern Europe under the Hanseatic League. Cities such as Hamburg and Lubeck in Germany. Bruges (present day Brussels) in what was then France, London, and Bergen in Norway became important centres of trade. After the decline of the Hanseatic League, London continued to thrive but was rivaled in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries by Amsterdam, which became a major trading and commercial centre. Much of this history is irrelevant to the present day experience of North Sea countries with offshore development but it is included to give some perspective to the very short experience North Sea countries have had with oil and gas compared to their long experience with trade, commerce and fishing. Turning to the recent North Sea experience, it has been slated that as late as 1958, a staff geologist with the Norwegian Geological Survey said he would drink all the oil that would be found on the Norwegian Continental Shelf (Stenstadvold, 1981, p.l). Such was the attitude to the prospects of finding offshore hydrocarbons until the mid-1960s. The first significant discovery of hydrocarbons by a North Sea country was not made offshore, but rather onshore, in the Netherlands, in 1959. In that year, the massive Slochteren gas field in Groningen Province, with estimated recoverable reserves of 63 trillion cubic feet, was discovered. Apparently, this discovery was not taken as an indication of the potential for oil and gas discoveries offshore as offshore drilling did not begin until several years later. In 1963 and 1964, Norway and the United Kingdom, respectively, declared sovereignty over their continental shelves. Offshore drilling licenses were issued very soon after sovereignty was declared but it was not until 1965 that the boundary between the United Kingdom and Norway was agreed to. The 1958 Geneva Continental Shelf Convention provided for the sovereign right of states to explore and exploit natural resources of the sea bed on the continental shelf to a depth of 200 metres, to the limits which exploitation of natural resources was feasible or, failing agreement between two littoral countries, to a line equidistant between them.