HOUSTON -- Academics at the University of Houston announced last week the start of a multiyear research effort to check the inconsistencies in the regulations of the United States and Mexico as offshore drilling in the Gulf of Mexico nears their shared border there.

The effort is inspired in part by the possibility of a major oil and gas resource that stretches across both sides of the maritime boundary in the Gulf.

Given the stark differences in the way the two countries manage their underground and offshore hydrocarbon reserves, researcher say they aim to look for potential areas of conflict in joint exploitation of such fields and ways in which those conflicts can be resolved.

The university's Center for U.S. and Mexican Law anticipates that its legal research project will take up to two to three years to complete.

On Feb. 20, the United States and Mexico signed an agreement aimed at spelling out what a collaborative approach toward exploiting cross-border offshore oil and gas reserves might look like. But the University of Houston Law Center team behind this latest initiative believes that the deal is lacking and will inevitably lead to "significant legal, institutional, and regulatory gaps and conflicts."

"The industry and regulatory cultures in the two countries are widely divergent," the center explains in a release announcing the start of the research project. "The U.S. model is based on private enterprise, market diversity and competition while state ownership of resources and a tightly protected monopoly exist on the Mexican side of the border."

The project will be undertaken in conjunction with other academic institutions in Texas and Mexico. The Center says that Miriam Grunstein, a professor at CIDE University in Mexico City, and Richard McLaughlin at the Harte Research Institute at Texas A&M University, Corpus Christi, will serve as directors.

Project leaders say their efforts will be conducted in phases. Part one of the study will seek to identify areas of conflict and incompatibility between the two countries' oil and gas regulatory systems and how they may disrupt joint offshore energy development and environmental protections. Part two will look at alleviating those conflicts.