Oil and Gas Infrastructure and Midstream Agreements

Book review by Thomas W Wälde, CEPMLP

Martyn David, Oil and Gas Infrastructure and Midstream Agreements, Langham Legal Publishing, London 1999, ISBN 0953463001

This is a follow-up to the successful edited book by the same author on "Upstream Oil and Gas Agreements", Sweet and Maxwell 1996 (reviewed in JENRL). It is focused on commercial agreements used in the oil and gas industry - and not treated in the prior book on "upstream oil and gas agreements". The editor, a well known oil&gas lawyer and executive, has assembled a competent editorial team of UK professionals. Part I deals with natural gas agreements (commingling of natural gas streams, cross-border interconnector gas agreements, gas sales agreements and power generation, gas balancing agreements), Part II with oil agreements: transhipment, ancillary pipeline, satellite tie-back and subsea-processing, FPSO agreements and tie-in agreements.

A disk with model agreements on power-generation gas sales, transhipment, satellite tie-back and subsea processing, FPSO and tie-in agreements is a very handy addition. As I understand it, a license to use the precedent material is given, though no legal liability is accepted.

This is a very useful tool for the - mainly UK North Sea - practitioner in the oil and gas industry. Most large companies will have established precedents in their system, so the collection should be particularly relevant for smaller or newcomer companies and practitioners. It would be interesting to see if these contracts are more or less similar across the global oil and gas industry, but the Association of International Petroleum Negotiators has, so far at least, not come out with manuals or model contracts for the sort of agreements now made public and intelligible by Martyn David.