Just last year, studies ranked Newfoundland and Labrador's offshore as fourth-best in the world in terms of all oil and gas attractions. We're very happy about our position in terms of competitiveness. However, in recent months, we've gotten a pretty big setback, and this has been in an area that is topical now in Houston, where I go to meetings. It is in the formation of marine refuge areas and marine protected areas.
Right at the moment, we are putting licence rounds out in a methodical two- and four-year horizon, which is decided by ministers of NRCan and natural resources in the province, but they are under strategic environmental assessments. We now have pockets of marine refuge areas, which I think were formerly fisheries exclusion areas, that overlap existing licences where companies have made hundreds of millions of dollars of bids and sit on some of the most prospective acreage anywhere. That's a barrier.
The geoscience barriers are being addressed. It's the above-ground barriers now we need to address, and most of those are policy-related.