Under international law, state's territorial sovereignty ends at its boundaries and any hydrocarbons reservoirs that straddle across would belong to a different state with control over such territory. The United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS) provides a legal framework for...

Unlike Antarctica, the Arctic can boast no region-specific treaty that comprehensively covers the challenges it faces, including potential threats to its marine areas. The Arctic states are, however, subjects of many international and regional legal instruments, most of which fall within the...

Tensions between Lebanon and Israel have been running high during the last months due to a legal dispute over rights to newly discovered natural oil and gas reserves in the Mediterranean Sea. Formally at war for years, and without diplomatic relations, Israel and Lebanon have never agreed on a...

The commercial development of offshore methane hydrates will necessitate planning for accidental risk. Due to the unique risks and hazards associated with the development of offshore methane hydrates, it is unlikely that their development would be capable of beginning without some form of ex...

The impact of natural resources on intrastate violence has been increasingly analyzed in the peace and conflict literature. Surprisingly, little quantitative evidence has been gathered on the effects of the resource-ownership structure on internal violence. This paper uses a novel dataset on oil...

The valuation of crude oil and gas reserves is a critical step in pricing crude oil and gas producing firms. This is of interest both to academics and practitioners who are called upon to value these firms. It is also of interest to regulators, particularly in their oversight of mergers and...

Although oil and gas exploration has been going on in East Africa for decades, until recently exploration activities grew more slowly compared to other regions in Africa. Today, there has been a series of oil and gas discoveries in several East African countries, including Kenya, Madagascar,...

We present a new dataset that tracks changes in legal ownership regimes in the petroleum sector between 1867 and 2008 for a panel of countries. We document that foreign ownership has been taken over by partnerships as the leading ownership regime, while domestic ownership is on the rise again in...