ConocoPhillips To Explore Idle Area

Canadian branch of US oil major ConocoPhillips will launch oil and gas exploration in the Laurentian sub-basin, an area off the coast of Canada's Atlantic Coast that has been in abeyance for years amid boundary disputes.
ConocoPhillips Canada reached an agreement with the Canada-Newfoundland Offshore Petroleum Board to convert the company's federal permits to nine-year exploration licenses for the potentially-oil-and-gas rich property, a 60,000-square-kilometre area deep in the waters between Newfoundland and Nova Scotia.
?This agreement paves the way for wildcat exploration in this frontier basin,? said Henry Sykes, President of ConocoPhillips Canada.
Geological surveys have indicated that the basin may contain as much as 7 trillion cubic feet of gas and 800 million barrels of oil.
The announcement came as Ottawa temporarily lifted a tax on mobile offshore drilling rigs earlier today.
Natural Resources Minister John Efford, who made the announcement at an offshore technology conference in Houston, Texas, said that the five-year moratorium on levies placed on rigs that drill beneath the seabed would boost the economic health of Atlantic Canada.