Reply #49: French Atlantic islands bid for oil-rich sea

[EuroObserver]

By Bill Law, BBC Radio 4's Crossing Continents

The French islands of St Pierre and Miquelon in the North Atlantic are fighting for a slice of oil-rich ocean floor they believe was taken from them, but their struggle could land France in rough diplomatic waters.
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Lying just off the south-eastern coast of the Canadian province of Newfoundland and Labrador, St Pierre and Miquelon are tiny islands that represent a past most people have forgotten and a present with a very uncertain future. The original French settlers were Basques, Bretons and Normans who arrived here in the 1600s. For centuries they fished the Grand Banks where the supply of cod was seemingly inexhaustible. All that came to an abrupt end in 1992, when the Canadian Government, appalled at the destruction of cod stocks by foreign trawlers, banned all cod fishing.

That same year - a year of infamy as far as the islanders are concerned - the Canadians hammered home their intention to protect and exploit the coastal waters. At an international tribunal in New York, sitting across the table from a French delegation, they successfully laid claim to a 200 mile exclusive economic zone. St Pierre and Miquelon were left with their own 200 mile zone, but bizarrely it is just 10 miles wide, a long thin finger of ocean running due south of the islands and leading nowhere. It was quickly dubbed "the baguette" by bitter islanders.

The ocean floor off Newfoundland and St Pierre and Miquelon, part of the continental shelf extending from Canada, is called the sub-Laurentian basin. It is rich in hydrocarbons, with estimates of some six trillion cubic feet of gas and six to seven billion barrels of oil. As new technologies come on stream and instability increases in other oil-producing regions of the world, the Sub-Laurentian basin is becoming an increasingly important energy source.
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Later this spring, a fourth offshore well will go into production in Canadian controlled waters. The once have-not province of Newfoundland has in the past few years begun to emerge from poverty into a potential that is rich in oil and gas. All the islanders can do is sit and watch - unless a bold initiative by St Pierre and Miquelon to take control of a piece of the continental shelf sitting outside the 200-mile zone and disconnected to the baguette succeeds. Fittingly, it is called the leapfrog. There is no precedent for it.

...more on this nicely quirky (but surely economically significant) story...