Marine Environmental Protection in Joint Development Agreements

Last year's Macondo blowout and the recent Gannet pipeline leak are reminders that offshore petroleum exploration and production have the potential to impact the environment negatively. In all regions of the world, states have negotiated joint development agreements (JDAs) to facilitate the development of offshore petroleum resources in zones where more than one state claims exclusive sovereignty. While the earliest JDAs contained no environmental protection provisions, more recent ones do. This article reviews three different models of JDAs to assess their relative merits in terms of environmental protection and to identify specific issues relating to environmental protection that negotiators of JDAs should consider.