Posted on 10/31/2011 8:43:11 AM PDT by bananaman22
First, the good news…
U.S. oil company ExxonMobil is reporting a “potentially significant” gas discovery off the coast of Vietnam, stating in a press release, "We can confirm ExxonMobil Exploration and Production Vietnam Limited drilled its second exploration well offshore Danang in August 2011 and encountered hydrocarbons."
ExxonMobil is the world's largest publicly traded oil company by market value. While Vietnam, an oil exporter and the third-largest oil producer in South Asia, began offshore exploration of its reserves in the 1970s, Hanoi only started in 2004 awarding offshore exploration concessions to a plethora of foreign companies, including those from the U.S., Canada and India with ExxonMobil receiving concessions from the Vietnamese government allowing it to explore blocks 117, 118 and 119 off Danang, an area that Vietnam insists is well within its 200-mile exclusive economic zone under international maritime law.
The bad news?
The South China Sea’s offshore resources are currently claimed by six countries – China, Vietnam, Taiwan, Malaysia, Brunei and the Philippines, with competing claims overlapping in a crazy quilt pattern. Given the billions of dollars at stake for exploiting the undersea energy resources, it is unlikely that the contradictory claims will be resolved anytime soon, making Southeast Asian waters a potential flash point for conflict.
The devil is in the details and in this case the United Nations unwittingly played the role of Lucifer when in 1982, the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea Part V, Article 55 defined an “exclusive economic zone” (EEZ) for countries with maritime frontiers as extending 200 nautical miles from a nation’s coastline. Needless to say, in congested waters this clause was a subject of dispute, as nations raced to define their new offshore parameters, a contest only heightened by the world’s increasing addiction to hydrocarbons.
Like Pontius Pilate, the UN washed its hands of bilateral and regional disputes arising from the convention and devolved negotiations to the parties involved, which account for the current impasse in the South China Sea, as the 1982 UNCLOS agreement did not establish any adjudication mechanism for resolving disputes.
According to Hanoi, Vietnam’s exploration efforts in what it maintains are incontestably within its EEZ waters have come under increasing harassment from Chinese naval Full article at: Apocalypse Redux? U.S. Natural Gas Find off Vietnam Could Raise Tensions with China
Mike
“Raising Tensions Between China and Vietnam”
It’s like Ali vs. Pee Wee Herman
Vietnam’s been kicking China ass for a thousand years. Has China ever won a war beside a civil war?
I have many young friends in Vietnam. They hate China and like the US. The next generation of Vietnamese will be very close to the US.
More natural gas found......liberals going insane!
I have many young friends in Vietnam. They hate China and like the US. The next generation of Vietnamese will be very close to the US.I think they've hated China for centuries. Wasn't Russia Ho Chi Min's big ally in the Vietnam War, and not China?
Both were Ho’s allies. Both the USSR and PRC supplemented the DRVN’s military forces.
Before the Sino-Soviet split. China supported the Khmer Rouge, which did not get along with North Vietnam, it was the NVA that ultimately liberated Cambodia in '79, much to the consternation of Beijing.
Correct. After the Sino-Soviet split, things became a bit dicey for Viet Nam’s commies.
There was an article in the WSJ by James Mullvah, CEO of CONOCOPhillips, mostly about the future of natural gas in the world.
The comment section set off flurry of comments from professional coal lobbyists for the national coal council.
The Democrats and the Obama administration is trying hard to push coal as the energy source for the third world and doesn’t want to admit that the natural gas is so plentiful and much cleaner than coal.
The Obama administration wants green energy for the US, even to point of suppressing the use and drilling of natural gas in the US, while pushing coal.
....all about union votes.
I’m wondering what Exxon knows that we don’t about stability in areas like Iraq and the South China Sea... or what they may have underestimated?
They keep taking risks they have not taken in the past Libya, Iraq and the disputed zone of the South China Sea.
China and Vietnam fighting? Dreams do come true!
We need to front the Vietnamese some nifty (and untraceable) weapons, just to even things out a bit...
The Vietnamese? The people who killed 55,000 Americans who were there to help them? The people who killed millions of their own people to replace the money-grubbing industrialists with communist money-grubbing industrialists? The people who built a socialist paradise where young boys prostitute themselves out to American homosexuals so they can eat? Where you can grow rich working for the Chinese plant owner for $100 a month? I’ve got a weapon for them. It’s called The Immediate Grenade. You pull the pin and it goes off. I’ll sell them millions of them.
Sorry you feel that way. The Germans and Japanese killed more and they’re allies of a sort. Heck, the Brits killed a lot us and we’re best friends.
I would take a little solace in the hopes that they’d be used to kill Chicoms, who also killed Americans in Korea.
My money is on China, in a fight with Vietnam.
The vietnamese fought the chinese in the late 70’s after the US left viet nam. The chinese were badly bloodied and went away.
“The vietnamese fought the chinese in the late 70’s after the US left viet nam. The chinese were badly bloodied and went away.”
It’s 2011 and times have changed. My money is on the Chinese and their massive numbers of soldiers, technology, etc.
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