In This Issue:

- LEX PETROLEA: Sources and Successes of International Petroleum Law

- The Top 10 Questions Facing the LNG Industry in 2015

- Drilling Contracts – Avoiding Misunderstanding

- Iran's Upstream Oil and Gas Sector: An Update on Sanctions, Nuclear Talks and the New Petroleum Contract

- Russia: Environmental Liability for Off-Shore Oil and Gas Operations

- Broader Regulation of Offshore Contractors on HorizonCNG Facility

- U.S. Government Agency Narrows Scope of Crude Oil Export Ban

- Excerpt from LEX PETROLEA: Sources and Successes of International Petroleum Law:

In the widely cited and sometimes wildly interpreted 1982 arbitration award issued by the tribunal in Aminoil v. Kuwait, the Government argued that compensation for its expropriation of Aminoil's concession should be based on precedents resulting from a series of transnational negotiations and agreements arising out of other recent nationalizations in the Middle East. According to the Government, these precedents had generated a customary rule valid for the oil industry – a lex petrolea in some way a particular branch of a general universal lex mercatoria. For this reason, Kuwait offered no more than net book value of the redeemable assets as compensation for its expropriation. For reasons of fact and law, the arbitral tribunal rejected this characterization of these so-called precedents as a lex petrolea. Aware of the complex nature of any negotiations about compensation in this context, the tribunal stressed that these settlement arrangements were more often than not complex, comprising not simply payment of indemnity but also bilateral arrangements of every type, not all of which had been made public or known with certainty. The tribunal also cited several reasons of law that weighed heavily against its finding any lex petrolea on this issue, among other things observing that Concessionaires often gave such consents under pressure of strong economic and political constraints having nothing to do with law. Despite this initial, notable rebuff of the notion of a lex petrolea, today four possible sources of a lex petrolea can be identified and considered – national petroleum laws, international petroleum contracts, custom and practice in the international oil industry, and international arbitration awards – and questions about the existence and composition of a lex petrolea can once again legitimately be asked.