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5 Most Coveted Offshore Petroleum Reserves
If you could gaze back through 500 million years of history, you’d find the oceans of prehistory swarming with microscopic life. Tiny floating plant and animal life drifted through the seas, spurred on by cooling ocean temperatures and an atmosphere that was rapidly reaching the levels of breathable oxygen we can’t live without. Ironically, the humans that eventually evolved out of these primordial waters now depend on another byproduct of this early era: petroleum.
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Under the United Nations’ Law of the Sea treaty, a coastal country can lay claim to coastal waters extending up to 200 nautical miles off its shoreline. A country can request up to 350 nautical miles if officials can prove the area is part of the country’s continental shelf by May 2009. The continental shelf is the sloping undersea plain that runs from dry land to the deep, open ocean.
Oil companies are frothing at the mouth to sink their drills into the ocean’s untapped fossil fuel riches. In this article, we’ll look at the five offshore petroleum reserves they’d most like to drain dry.
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