| Summary: | The Arctic Ocean has been identified as a region of potentially significant oil and gas reserves. It has significant political importance for its coastal states. These factors are complicated by its hostile geographical location and its extremely fragile and vulnerable environment. For an oil company to embark on exploration and exploitation in this region it must be assured of secure title to the oil it produces, and it is therefore this issue on which the analysis focusses. This thesis examines acquisition of title to petroleum in the Arctic region, analyses how secure such title is, and critiques the role international law plays in achieving security of tenure. It adopts a top down approach tracing title to petroleum in the Arctic from the international law level, through coastal states’ regimes, down to the oil company level. Analysing this chain of title, the study examines whether indigenous peoples of the Arctic have become stakeholders in Arctic offshore petroleum, whether international law with respect to indigenous peoples’ rights and self-determination has played any part in facilitating this development, and whether these rights have impacted, directly or indirectly, on title to offshore petroleum in the Arctic Ocean. The thesis also examines whether the other aspect of sustainable development of petroleum in the Arctic, environmental protection, affects either title to petroleum or its exercise. In examining the Arctic coastal states’ rights, the thesis identifies several new problematic legal areas, in particular in relation to the use of ice formations as loci for territorial sea basepoints, highly ambulatory coastlines causing issues for locating valid territorial sea baselines, and thawing subsea permafrost creating ‘ambulatory continental shelves’. Such issues, the study shows, may have serious implications for the validity of certain coastal states’ maritime delineations, with corollary implications for title to petroleum in specific offshore areas. The work also studies the national regimes ...
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