Russia will seek the adoption of a convention on oil spill prevention at the next G20 summit, Russian President Dmitry Medvedev said on Friday.
"I said that we will come back to this issue next year, including the possibility of adopting a convention dedicated to the consequences of oil spills," Medvedev said at a press conference after the G20 meeting in South Korea.
The current international legal base does not effectively prevent such consequences, evidence of which became the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, Medvedev said.
"We intend to seek more," the president said.
The explosion on the Deepwater Horizon oil drilling platform in the Gulf of Mexico in April killed 11 workers and caused America's worst-ever environmental disaster.
The disaster is expected soon trigger an avalanche of offshore oil development legislation, which may slash the number of operators authorized to develop offshore oil, an international marine lawyer said in September.
International and national legislation related to the consequences of offshore oil accidents is still not sufficiently developed, in contrast to the huge number of regulations related to oil tanker spills, said international marine lawyer Dr. Sergei Vinogradov of Dundee University's Center for Energy, Petroleum and Mineral Law and Policy.
BP set up its own $20 billion escrow account immediately after the Deepwater Horizon explosion to cover the costs of dealing with the clean-up and compensation claims.
The company also established a Gulf Coast Claims Facility (GCCF), a financial fund, to which all claims are being submitted. Some 42,000 claims had been handed to the GCCF by September and over 4,900 claimants have already been compensated. "In fact, BP is now paying out money to all affected; $399 million has already been allocated for this," Vinogradov said.
Russia should learn its own lessons from the BP crisis, Yelena Andreeva, an expert from the Russian Academy of Sciences' Institute for Systems Analysis said. "The development of offshore legislation is in its infancy in Russia. However, Russia plans to launch offshore development in the Caspian Sea and the Arctic, where any failure would be even more disastrous than this in the Gulf of Mexico due to the climatic and environmental conditions," she said.
"That's why we in Russia should urgently get involved in developing advanced offshore legislation," she said.
SEOUL, November 12 (RIA Novosti)
