BEIJING: Its capital Pyongyang lies nearly dark at night for lack of power, but North Korea could be sitting on enough oil to revive its moribund economy and fuel Chinese-style reforms, analysts and geologists say.

Years of isolation, which have earned it the nickname “the Hermit Kingdom”, mean most of its potentially oil-bearing areas are virtually unexplored. And where crude has been found almost no attempts have been made at commercial recovery.

Estimates of how much lies pooled below its soil and seas range from nothing at all to more than the reserves of some members of the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC).

With Pyongyang feuding with Washington over its nuclear weapons programmes, decades behind the rest of the world in oil exploitation technology, and barely able to feed its population, chances of firming the figures or extracting any oil seem slim.

But recent breakthroughs in talks aimed at dismantling its nuclear arsenal offer some hope that sanctions could be lifted. This could also mean the end of an international business climate in which cooperation with Pyongyang can be “politically poisonous” — according to one oil man who had worked there.

Allowing the reclusive regime international help in its hunt for crude could also help fuel a reform process like the one that transformed China over the past three decades, experts say.

“If we want to see Korea evolve from a military dictatorship, as happened in China, then it is desirable that they be allowed to look for oil,” said Selig Harrison of the Washington-based Centre for International Policy.

“There is no doubt economic controls are loosening but that’s creating big problems for the central government, and unless they can... become more solvent, the reforms could be economically destabilising,” he added.

Most geologists agree that if North Korea has sizeable reserves they are likely to lie under its sea, not onshore.

It has claims on the northernmost of three Yellow Sea basins thought to hold oil, and most of its offshore exploration to date has been focused there, despite a low-key dispute with China over the maritime boundary between the two countries.

Some geologists think it could have deposits similar to the rich reserves in China’s nearby Bohai Bay while shallow seas make drilling relatively easy.

One-third of 15 exploratory wells have shown oil, and Pyongyang may be sitting on information about larger deposits.

“North Korea has found on the continental shelf of the West Bay basin an area containing 3 billion tonnes (21.9 billion barrels) of oil and gas reserves,” Li Yandong and Mo Jie wrote in a 2002 issue of journal Marine Geology Letters.

North Korea says these are recoverable reserves pinpointed by its own scientists, said a Chinese expert with knowledge of the situation, who declined to be named.

Even a more modest estimate of 1.2 billion barrels reported by Busuph Park, an expert in North Korea’s offshore efforts, would meet centuries of current consumption, although some academics say the peninsula has almost no commercial oil.

At the North Korean embassy in Beijing, an official dismissed with a laugh reports of up to 9 billion tonnes of reserves and said the country was still investigating. But even if the Yellow Sea fails to live up to hopes, there is also the vast and untouched East Korea Bay, where only two exploratory wells have been drilled and which has been compared geologically to Russia’s Sakhalin island.—Reuters