INTERVIEW-Iceland to offer offshore oil and gas licenses

By Wojciech Moskwa, Nordic Energy Correspondent

OSLO, Aug 20 (Reuters) - With resource nationalism rising as fast as oil prices, Iceland is looking to provide international oil companies something they increasingly lack -- access to new areas potentially rich with oil and gas.

What's the catch? The 100 or so offshore licences the island plans to offer in 2009 are in remote Arctic waters of the north Atlantic and at depths of up to 2,000 metres (6,560 feet).

Still, Reykjavik is betting that hunger to replace waning reserves, stoked by historically high oil prices, and new technology to more easily exploit hard-to-reach deposits will lure both the majors and minnows of the oil world to its waters.

"It's a busy and exciting time, with lots of unknowns," said Thorarinn Arnarsson, hydrocarbon licensing manager at Iceland's Energy Authority. "But we believe this is a good time to introduce our area and we are finding a lot of interest."

"We'll love to have the big companies come in but it's likely to be the risk-takers that get here first and hopefully show the others," he told Reuters in a telephone interview late on Tuesday.

Iceland is hammering out the financial terms and tax rules for its first licensing round, which is due to cover about 40,000 square kilometres of seas about 330 km north-east of Iceland and due south from Norway's Jan Mayen islands.

The first licenses will have a duration of 12 to 16 years and, following any successful exploration, production for up to 30 years, according to industry weekly newspaper Upstream.

Unlike oil-rich Venezuela and Russia, which have tightened the screws on international oil players to boost their state energy producers, Iceland does not have a national oil company.