| Maritime boundary dispute and oil and gas exploration in the Bay of the Bengal Cdre. Md. Khurshed Alam ndc,psc BN (retd)
THE issue of maritime boundary and deep-sea exploration for oil and gas has added new dimension to our relationship with both of our neighbours. Bangladesh, which has hardly any other natural resources besides gas, have no alternative than to maximize the resources of the sea. But in this effort, India and Myanmar are laying unjustified claims on our Exclusive Economic Zone (EEZ) and Continental Shelf (CS) without having an iota of regard for the spirit and tenets of International law. India and Myanmar unilaterally ignored Bangladesh's claim of maritime boundary and EEZ announced in 1974, and we continued to watch this grabbing of sea areas without doing anything mentionable. 
The importance of oil and gas as an economic resource is very well known and is vital for the survival of 150 million people living in an area of only 147,000 sq km, and the rising oil prices have further aggravated our condition. Gas is a major source of revenue and employment for our expanding industrial growth. Bangladesh, though very late, announced third round bidding to award its 28 deep-sea and shallow water blocks to IOCs. It is now learnt that out of the 20 deep-sea blocks, some IOCs have only submitted bids for 8 deep-sea blocks which are not at all disputed by the neighbours. Myanmar has influenced major oil companies not to participate in the bidding and issued letters to a number of prospective bidders asking them not to sign PSC in the disputed blocks.
India, besides warning IOCs about the consequence of their investments, has also protested not to award the offshore blocks without resolving the issue of boundary. Whatever may be the strategy of our government about this bidding, it has backfired on us as there has not been a positive response and none of the Oil majors like Chevron, Exxon-Mobil or Shell submitted bids, rather they stayed away because of concerted efforts by India and Myanmar. What is important to note that there was hardly any reasonable bid for disputed blocks showing total regard to the Indian and Myanmar claims by the IOCs and this is going to strengthen the position of India and Myanmar as they have been successful in totally disregarding our EEZ claim of 1974.
Oil and gas exploration in the Bay of Bengal started in 1974; Petrobangla conducted the first-round bidding, in which 47 IOCs took part. Petrobangla signed 6 production-sharing contracts with Atlantic Richfield, Union Oil, Ashland, Canadian Superior Oil, BODC and Ina Naftaplin. Ashland was allocated the western block down the Sunderban area and India objected for such exploration to then Bangladesh Government and also wrote to the head office of Ashland Company on the plea that it will not allow exploration and exploitation of any gas or oil find since the maritime boundary with Bangladesh had not been demarcated. Soon after the protest, the Ashland Company left Bangladesh waters and the then government accepted the fait accompli. None of our governments took any tangible steps toward solving the maritime boundary problems and rather showed utter negligence towards our legal scope to nullify the Indian protest and also increase our geographic area by about two to three times that of Bangladesh in the Bay of Bengal. Bangladesh passed the "Territorial Waters and Maritime Zones Act" in the Parliament in 1974 but subsequent declaration of unique depth metric baselines by the Ministry again evoked strong protest from India stating that the baseline had intruded 21 nautical miles (nm) inside Indian waters. Even at that time our government in power neither tried to solve the problem through discussion nor could it ensure continuation of exploration by the IOC in the face of Indian protests.
We again had a historic opportunity during drafting of UNCLOS from 1973-1982 to include the system of the adopted baseline of 1974 in the related articles of UNCLOS and to convince other countries about deleting some of the articles which would not be in favour of Bangladesh in subsequent delimitation with our neighbours. However, we failed miserably to act on either count. Not much of exploration work on the five offshore blocks have so far been undertaken except discovery of Sangu gas field with about .848 TCF of recoverable gas. Petrobangla in their subsequent bidding awarded eight contracts to the IOCs related to land areas. No Bangladesh government after 1974 ever made any real effort to explore in the deep waters of our claimed EEZ and hardly showed any real concern for delimiting maritime boundary.
India, under the New Exploration Licensing Policy, offered 55 blocks (24 deepwater blocks beyond 400m bathymetry) for exploration to the IOCs in the Bay of Bengal in 2006. The map published by India clearly showed that blocks D-23 (8,706sqkm) and D-22 (7,790sqkm) have overlapped Bangladesh's block 21 declared in 1991. Once the attention of the Ministry was drawn to such reports, it said that it is hard to say for sure how much the Indian blocks actually overlapped Bangladesh territory as the map can be deceiving and does not specify the exact geographical position of the Indian blocks. But visually it is found that the Indian blocks appear to have overlapped our block 21. Due to strong pressure from the media about such floating of international tenders by India encompassing our blocks of EEZ, Bangladesh finally lodged official protest against the 'encroachment' through the Indian High Commissioner. It is really unfortunate to find that our Ministry did not know when India declared the blocks and nor did we register any protest with the IOC about the consequences of such exploration in an area which we claimed to be ours since 1974. We should have pursued the case with India with the aim of stopping exploration legally in D-22, 23 and registered our strongest protest with the concerned IOC as India had done in 1974 and again in 2008.
Myanmar on the other hand made significant gas discovery in A1 and A3 gas fields/block, in Rakhaine coast that lies in the Bay of Bengal, offshore from the Myanmar town of Sittwe and is only about 100 km from Teknaf coast of Bangladesh. Daewoo of Korea, which is the operator of A1 and A3 gas fields with gas reserves of around five to six trillion cubic feet owns 40% stakes whereas two Indian Companies - Gas Authority India Ltd and a subsidiary of Oil and Natural Gas Corporation - hold 30% and the remaining 30% is held by Myanmar. It has already agreed to export gas to China and India. China has offered to construct a pipeline from A-1 and A-3 gas fields in the Bay of Bengal to the Chinese border, a distance of around 900 km and also signed PSC with Myanmar to explore oil and gas in three offshore blocks. What is very disturbing to note is that we hardly knew Myanmar had already declared blocks overlapping our blocks in the EEZ areas which we have claimed in 1974. Myanmar also stopped our survey vessel to work in our EEZ areas. Finally the Ministry called the Myanmar Ambassador drawing attention of his government to the news items published regarding allocation of undemarcated areas to conduct survey for exploration of oil and gas in the Bay of Bengal. Besides, we also lost another opportunity to route the tri-nation gas pipeline through Teknaf as the agreed MoU for open access pipeline had provisions for injection and siphoning off gas from Bangladesh and Indian gas fields. In the wake of serious gas supply situation, Bangladesh also proposed to Myanmar for importing gas from the adjacent off shore gas field. But Myanmar government appeared to have regretted to consider the proposal saying that it has already committed to export most of its gas to China and India although gas pipeline to China and India will be much longer than that to Bangladesh.
Under the UNCLOS 1982, Bangladesh is entitled to claim 200nm of sea area as its EEZ and all living and non-living resources within these areas are exclusively the property of Bangladesh. Out of this, the first 12 miles are called Territorial Sea (TS) and the next 188 miles are its EEZ. Bangladesh must also claim another 150-mile or more from the limit of the EEZ based on the geo-physical characteristics of the seabed as the extended CS. However, to claim the CS, we have to complete various surveys as prescribed by the UN and submit our claim before 2011. India and Myanmar arbitrarily drew the maritime boundary under equidistance principle, which in effect is allowed only up to 12 miles of TS.
Thereafter the UNCLOS articles 74 and 83 are very clear contrary to the claim of both countries that the maritime boundaries of EEZ and CS have to be delimited by agreement in order to achieve equitable solution taking relevant circumstances like general configuration of the coast, concavity of our coastline, natural prolongation, disparity in length of the coastline, economic factors/dependency patterns, existence of natural resources, comparative socio-economic conditions, etc. into account. Law allows solution through mutual negotiation so that unilateral claim may not cause severe deprivations to entire social process of Bangladesh or even going to the arbitration courts.
In our case probable deposit of mineral resources is divided by the division line of the zones of the EEZ and CS. The part of the deposit which is located on one of the sides of the division line is fully or partially exploitable by Indian and Myanmar installations which are located on the other side of the line. In such cases we cannot maintain our own rights to the mineral resources of the subsurface of our claimed EEZ and CS as they can simply siphon off our oil and gas and other resources.
It is now evident that India and Myanmar have intentionally intruded into our EEZ and exploring oil/gas there by demanding an equidistant line, which is not supportable by the UNCLOS and Geneva Convention. India has mapped out a line up to Andaman incorporating Bangladeshi EEZ and CS waters. Similarly, the Myanmar line enters our sea area beside block 18 and allows her to grab vast offshore areas of Bangladesh. But this has not been done today or yesterday, rather it happened in the '80s. Bangladesh officials since 1980, have always told us through the media that we have good bilateral relations with both of our neighbours and the dispute will be resolved in line with the relevant international laws and bilateral relationship as they are repeating the same sentences to day. But such diplomatic words did not bring any good results to our core maritime boundary problem and there was hardly any initiative to solve this important issue. This happened partly because of total ignorance about the importance of "Sea Bangladesh" and partly because of our complex bureaucracy terming this issue as very sensitive and trying to hide reality under the garbage of sensitivity for the last 26 years.
We even could not establish the fact that neither India nor Myanmar has legitimate right for exploration on our claimed waters as the maritime boundary with Bangladesh is not yet resolved. Now it would not be right to blame various groups objecting to the bidding process as they have become apprehensive about the failure of successive governments for non bidding of the deep sea blocks in the last 30 years, inaction of the ministries not registering protest with the IOCs and the government of India and Myanmar at the right time for an acceptable solution and most importantly having scandals like Scimitar, Niko and handing over Petrobangla gas field to IOC in recent times.
Even in our past dealings we have hardly shown any urgency to solve the problem of maritime boundary and if the issue is allowed to go in hibernation then we will be losing our own waters and exploring rights to the neighbours just because our government never felt the importance of delimiting the 650km long maritime frontier on both sides of our waters in the spirit of equality and respect for each other's legitimate interests.
The writer is an expert on maritime issues, and author of "Bangladesh's Maritime Challenges in the 21st century." | |