Spreading our territory

With undersea mining about to get under way along the Kermadec Arc, and a vast area of continental shelf to be added to its Exclusive Economic Zone (EEZ), New Zealand is preparing new legislation to cover its off-shore territory, the fourth largest in the world.

The United Nations is poised to add 1.6 million square kilometres, six times the country’s land-mass, to New Zealand’s EEZ under the global Law of the Sea, and the Ministry for the Environment is hastening to develop legislation to govern the potential bonanza.

Coverage by the 15-year-old Resource Management Act (RMA) extends only 12 miles off the coast, but with undersea mining and petroleum exploration activity expected to snowball, new legislation is required to give certainty to investors.

The Environment Ministry’s Daniel Brown told the recent Aus-IMM conference that the planned legislation will address unregulated or poorly regulated environmental effects such as disturbance of the seafloor and potential conflict between activities, such as the effects on fishing of petroleum platforms. Existing environmental and transport laws will remain as they are.

“The legislation will define activities within its scope into three categories: permitted, discretionary and prohibited. Low-impact permitted activities will not require an EEZ consent as long as they comply with legislative standards. Larger-scale activities will require a full impact assessment and an EEZ consent,” Brown says.

The extension of the country’s jurisdiction over its continental shelf will be its biggest territorial gain since the establishment of its 200-mile EEZ added four million square kilometres in 1978. The territorial shelf claim was lodged with the United Nations in 2006 after a 10-year and $44 million research project to work out its limits, and following an agreement with Australia two years earlier over undersea boundaries in the Tasman. Further such agreements will have to be reached with Fiji and Tonga.

The new territory includes a big chunk of the Lord Howe Rise in the Tasman Sea, a block extending north into the Pacific towards Fiji and Tonga and including most of the Kermadec Arc, an area to the east skirting the Chatham Rise, and additional areas to the far south.

The area covers potentially vast oil and mineral deposits, among them being those for which Neptune Minerals is seeking a mining licence. There are potentially large oil deposits on both the Lord Howe and Chatham Rises, further mineral-rich SMS deposits on the Three Kings Ridge north of New Zealand, and possibly billions of dollars worth of manganese nodules on southern parts of the shelf.

At the time of writing New Zealand had yet to be formally advised by the UN of the success of its application for the continental shelf extensions to its EEZ, but a favourable decision is understood to have been made in late August.