hankyoreh

Yoo Gang-mun, Beijing Correspondent

BEIJING-Follow along the east coast of China and you will see a sea enclosed by the Liaodong Peninsula from above and the Shandong Peninsula protruding up from below. It makes you think of an amoeba caught between a person's upper and lower teeth. The Chinese call the body of water thus contained the Bohai Sea. The body of water outside the peninsular division is what we Koreans call the West Sea. On Qingdao Island you can actually see where one sea starts and the other begins. There are people there who rent out binoculars so you can see it, and I'm told they do pretty good business.

Bohai is a "dead sea." It is the most polluted of all the waters along the Chinese coast. The Bohai Bay, which encompasses the industrial city of Tianjin, is particularly appalling. It is so bad, in fact, that media reports say that if the polluting of the bay continues for another ten years every last living thing in it is going to die off. Some experts say that even if there is no additional pollution it will take 200 years for the bay to self-cleanse itself.

Nonetheless, the bay has become known as a "golden sea." Oil fields large and small were first discovered on the continental shelf there in 2002, exciting a China starved for oil. Recently a billion ton oil field was discovered; enough to power Korea for close to a decade. A recent Chinese government report estimates there is 20.5 billion tons of oil in Bohai Bay, enough for China to use for close to 80 years.

The same continental shelf extends to the West Korea Bay, off the North Korean city of Nampo. China calls this area the North Yellow Sea Basin. For some time now experts have said it is highly likely there is oil buried there. The Energy Information Administration, a body under the United States Department of Energy, once estimated there is hydrocarbon buried in the area in the floor of the West Korea Bay, which is geographically linked to the Bohai Bay. Hydrocarbon is the chemical name for oil and gas.

North Korea has reportedly discovered an oil field there. They say it explored the area in 1965 and is extracting 30 to 50 tons of crude a day from two offshore drills. If true, North Korea is a full-fledged oil producing nation. When late Hyundai group founder Chung Joo-young met North Korea's National Defence Commission chairman Kim Jong-il in 1998, Kim boasted that he could supply oil to South Korea with a pipeline coming from the North's oil field.

However, the West Korea Bay oil field has never really been developed, because American economic sanctions have prevented the oil industry's big players from access. The fact that China and North Korea are as of yet unable to decide where their border is has also been an obstacle. China reportedly claims that 70 percent of the body is its territorial water, based on a border that follows 124 degrees east longitude.

The two countries are working around this obstacle by going about joint development. In December 2005 they signed an agreement on joint maritime oil development, marking the start of West Korea Bay floor exploration. China's geological survey authority already completed an assessment of the situation for oil and natural gas there last October. Given how China was so proactive in signing an agreement with North Korea, it is highly likely they have already determined there to be economic feasibility.

What will happen if oil starts shooting out of the floor of the West Korea Sea? North Korea would then have another strategic weapon - oil - in addition to nuclear arms. It would mean the North is an oil producing nation that has nuclear weapons, but no one knows whether the international community would accept a "strong" North Korea. Some North Korea experts say a "strong North Korea" would lead to a "flexible North Korea." Selig Harrison of the U.S. Center for International Policy once said that if you want to see Pyongyang change, it needs to be able to have oil.

Please direct questions or comments to [englishhani@hani.co.kr]