1920 treaty holds key to Arctic energy riches

The earls, dukes and ambassadors representing World War One victors in Paris in 1920 believed they had solved a diplomatic headache when they signed a treaty giving Norway a remote group of Arctic islands. That headache has now turned into a migraine.
Interpretation of the Svalbard treaty, which gave an Arctic archipelago the size of Ireland to Norway but gave others equal access to its resources, will decide future energy and fishing rights in the lucrative north Barents Sea.
The area holds the world's best stocks of cod, worth billions of dollars, and geologists say it could contain massive energy supplies comparable with the southern sector of the sea.
The two sectors could hold a combined total of up to 6.3 billion barrels of undiscovered oil equivalent, almost as much as Azerbaijan's total reserves. Norway already has its own treaty interpretation: the rights are theirs.
"Norway's view is that a shelf goes from Norway up north and Svalbard is part of that shelf," Norwegian Prime Minister Jens Stoltenberg told a news conference in Svalbard's largest town, Longyearbyen, in June.
It's not the geology other nations dispute, it's the ownership.
Norway says the treaty's provision that all have equal rights to Svalbard's resources stops at the territorial boundary 12 miles (19 km) off the coast and does not apply to the sea and continental shelf up to 200 miles (320 km) offshore which by maritime law also belongs to the islands. Others say the same conditions apply.
Britain made the point by writing a rare diplomatic letter to Norway's government this year, saying it would protect its interests, Russia has continually protested against Norway's claims and even Iceland, a Nordic ally, has clashed with Norway over fishing rights.
"The only problem with the treaty is that it does not talk about the open sea and the continental sea shelf," said Geir Ulfstein, a law professor at the University of Oslo and a respected expert on the Svalbard Treaty.
Norway and Russia already dispute rights to an area of the Barents Sea the size of the North Sea between their two east/west sectors.
At the end of next year Norway plans to open a gas field in the southern Barents Sea which will ship supplies to the United States, and Russia is drawing up plans to develop its Barents Sea Shtokman field which will be one of the biggest in the world.
Global warming, widely blamed on human burning of fossil fuels, is partly driving interest in the Arctic by thawing formerly inaccessible regions.