Introduction

Over the past 25 years, an increasing number of international arbitral awards relating to the petroleum industry have been published. These public awards provide the source material from which customary law may be drawn. The Government of Kuwait argued, in one case, that a sub-species of these disputes has "generated a customary rule valid for the oil industry - a lex petrolea that was in some sort a particular branch of a general universal lex mercatoria."[1] In the context of that very narrow claim, the contention was rejected, but it is the thesis of this paper that in a ...