Stabilisation and Renegotiation Clauses in Production Sharing Contracts: Examining the Problems and Key Issues
OPEC's Monthly Oil Market Report (May, 2011) depicts that the price of OPEC's Reference Basket increased in April, 2011 by about $8.25 compared to March, 2011 and by $35.76 from a year earlier. The Nymex WTI and ICE Brent contracts also witnessed their highest prices since the global financial crisis of 2008. Oil producers like Nigeria are not just on the verge of a national petroleum industry 'legal revolution' in its quest to ensure maximum benefits accrue from oil and gas resource exploitation, but as overtime found itself in politically and economically unacceptable position as parties to Exploration and Production arrangements with investing Oil Companies.Russia, Venezuela, Bolivia etc. have also been earmarked as producers that consistently engage in petroleum contract reviews and nationalisation to ensure petroleum arrangements yield maximum benefits for the State. Following this background and coupled with the unique attributes of Production Sharing Contracts as a preferred option for arranging upstream petroleum operations, this paper essentially seeks to examine the assertion that- there is no absolute 'contractual security' for contracting parties. By highlighting relevant problems and issues, especially in countries like Nigeria, it points out that contractual instruments like stabilization, renegotiation and adaptation clauses can at best guide and not freeze-up relationship and cooperation inter vivos, towards contractual efficiency. This paper examines the use and legal implications of stabilisation and renegotiation clauses in production sharing contracts (PSCs) in the petroleum industry, especially as a means of guaranteeing contractual security. It identifies relevant issues and comments on problems arising from the use of these clauses in guiding the relationships of parties, especially as contractual instruments for risk management.
Contracting and regulatory issues in the oil and gas and metallic minerals industries
This article looks at key regulatory and contractual issues in the oil and gas and also metal minerals industries. It provides an overview of contract types and discusses several state-of-the-art issues. In discussing contract types, it first provides a brief historical backdrop. It then turns to the major contract types. Both the history of traditional concessions and the enumerated present-day contract types are common to oil and gas and also metal mineral extraction. For this reason, they will be discussed together. Among state-of-the-art issues, the article considers (1) contract renegotiations, mainly with regard to Bolivia, Ecuador and the Venezuela; (2) the proposed Iraqi oil law; and (3) the handling of human rights and environmental issues by projects.
Old English Manuscripts in the Early Age of Print: Matthew Parker and his Scribes
Covering the first dedicated program in the study of and publication of Anglo-Saxon texts, my dissertation examines the sixteenth-century origins of medieval studies as an academic discipline. By placing recent scholarship on media, materiality, cognition, and intellectual history in conversation with traditional paleographical methods on medieval and renaissance manuscript culture, I argue for a new way of understanding how early modern scholars studied and presented the medieval past. I take as my focus a corpus of emulative Anglo-Saxon manuscript transcriptions produced under Elizabethan Archbishop Matthew Parker. Equal parts facsimile and edition, these transcriptions are a unique example of early modern scholars navigating the often competing demands of late sixteenth century manuscript and print culture. This dissertation is, in part, an attempt to catalogue and document the extent of Parkerian Anglo-Saxon manuscript transcriptions. Temporally displaced from their source texts, Parker and his scribes directly modified many of the medieval manuscripts they recovered by editing, rebinding, cropping, and annotating them according to their own interpretive desires and publication needs. These transcriptions place Parker’s early modern scribes into the textual community of early medieval scribal culture, but their printed manuscript editions are an attempt to bring medieval documents into contemporary discourse. They developed new typefaces modeled on manuscript exemplars and attempted to reframe the printed version of a medieval text as an authoritative surrogate