Australia may gain rich undersea gas, oil deposits

SYDNEY: Australia may have gained rich undersea gas and oil deposits when the UN granted it huge swathes of territory this week but reaching them represents a major challenge, experts said Tuesday. Resources Minister Martin Ferguson said the country had gained a potential "bonanza", when he announced on Monday the UN's decision to expand Canberra's jurisdiction over an area of seabed five times the size of France. But resources experts, while welcoming the move, said most of the new 2.5 million square kilometres (965,255 square miles) was either off limits to explorers or hidden in waters up to 2.4 kilometres (1.5 miles) deep.

"Yes, there could be a lot of oil and gas out there in those deep waters but it's going to be very, very expensive to extract," Phillip Coorey, from the Petroleum Exploration Society of Australia, told AFP. "So OK, there's potentially big rewards but there's an awful lot of investment as well, so bonanza, I'm not so sure." He said deep-water drilling was most advanced in the Gulf of Mexico and industry had found it "not terribly lucrative" due to the huge development costs.

Coorey said an area of seabed off Australia's north-west coast was considered the most promising resources prospect, because it was adjacent to existing gas fields. The Great Australian Bight, south-west of Adelaide, and waters south of Tasmania were of less interest to explorers, he said, as were areas in the Pacific around Lord Howe and Norfolk Islands. The government has already ruled out allowing resources development in two areas of newly-acquired seabed off Antarctica and Macquarie Island in the Southern Ocean.

The UN decision gives Australia control of the seabed and resources beneath it, but not fisheries in the nominated area. While technology is expected to eventually improve access to deep-sea oil and gas fields, Australian Petroleum Production and Exploration Association chief executive Belinda Robinson said viable extraction was a long-term proposition.

"We still know very little about these areas," she told ABC radio. "They are in deep water, most of the territory that we already have is under-explored, so we're not even putting a massive effort into the known areas. "We're still a long way away and it would be premature to talk about these new areas delivering the long-term energy security we need any time soon." Resource-rich Australia is already the world's largest coal exporter and the fifth largest natural gas exporter, but imports petroleum, according to government data from 2006.