But China says its zone extends to the edge of the continental shelf, almost to Japan.
In his first week as president, Obama rescinded a Bush executive order that permitted drilling on the continental shelf.
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As reserves from the continental shelf decline, the big oil companies can't afford to sit out the riskier game farther offshore.
They can often be found on the slopes of the continental shelf, though as yet they are impossibly awkward to extract.
The new westbound lane would extend three miles past the continental shelf, and contain traffic to a defined area over the whale feeding grounds.
An agency called the Commission on the Limits of the Continental Shelf decides on the merits of the case, but it has no powers of enforcement.
So far the discoveries are tracking the production curve of the Continental Shelf, where 40 billion barrels have been located since drilling began in the late 1940s.
Under such circumstances, the United States would be obliged to accept the diktat of one of the multilateral agencies spawned by LOST, a 21-nation Commission on the Limits of the Continental Shelf.
Wetland loss has been caused by the Army Corps of Engineers channeling the Mississippi for flood control, with the result that all the sediment in the river is being lost over the continental shelf.
For years the company liked having control and access to the maze of pipelines that crisscross the continental shelf because it made it cheaper to bring oil and gas to market from the deepwater fields.
In the deep water, large swaths of Wilcox sediment slumped over the side of the continental shelf and were swallowed by a layer of salt that dates back to when the American continents pulled away from Europe and Africa.
Golden, then a staff geologist and now head of deepwater exploration for BP, came up with a theory that massive oil deposits lay just beyond the Continental Shelf in the Gulf of Mexico, in waters 300 meters deep or more.
Chevron has 100 prospective drilling spots in the Gulf of Mexico, but its highest hopes for a resumption of deepwater drilling lay in an area called the Lower Tertiary Wilcox trend, near where the continental shelf drops off into deep water.
Under procedures laid out in Annex II of the treaty, the petitioning party submits geologic data and makes its case for expansion before a LOST body called the Commission on the Limits of the Continental Shelf, which then makes its determination as to the claim.
As Director of the Office of Legal Affairs of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Greece from 1976 to 1995, he had represented the Ministry in the case of the Continental Shelf of the Aegean Sea in front of the International Court of Justice (The Hague) in 1976.
Complicating matters further is the fact that the richest petroleum deposits lie in the Okinawa Trough, an 8, 200-foot (2.5 kilometer) gash in the seafloor that separates the Chinese continental shelf from the Western Pacific.
Hibernia Atlantic is shaving 310 miles off the current trans-Atlantic journey, by following the shallow continental shelf (despite the heightened risk of damage).
Mr. Obama's has blocked exploration and production on significant areas of the Outer Continental Shelf, and the few leases he has put up for auction contain land that is of little value to drillers.
Russian scientists are keen on proving that the seabed below the North Pole is part of the Eurasian continental shelf, an area called the Lomonosov Ridge.
Business advisory firm Deloitte said the amount of drilling, as well as the number of oil and gas field deals on the UK Continental Shelf, levelled out in the first quarter of this year.
Congress quietly lifted the ban on offshore oil drilling yesterday, opening the vast waters of the outer continental shelf to oil and gas companies eager to exploit the area's substantial energy resources.
In a proposal issued the week before Katrina, the Department of the Interior announced it wanted to open the outer continental shelf (600 to 9, 500 feet underwater) to exploration in the next round of lease auctions.
Since 1982, the federal government has prohibited this, along most of the Outer Continental Shelf.
More domestic supply, which means quick assurance that Congress will open gas-rich acreage on the Outer Continental Shelf.
The discovery may represent one of the ten largest oil finds ever on the Norwegian Continental Shelf (NCS).
Royal Dutch Shell estimates that the waters of the outer continental shelf contain 100 billion barrels of technically recoverable oil.
Recent studies have found that federal waters along the Outer Continental Shelf likely contain more than 80 billion barrels of oil.
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They accounted for 36% of deals completed following the recent 27th licensing round, which brought new entrants to the UK Continental Shelf.
It believed tax changes introduced by the government last year to incentivise investment in the UK continental shelf were now bearing fruit.
Ithaca recently purchased a 14% stake in MacCulloch, which lies 250km (155 miles) north east of Aberdeen on the UK Continental Shelf.
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