The breakdown of the 300 year old Grotian regime of freedom of the seas and the subsequent rise in confusion as to acceptable claims for maritime waters is generally reported to date to somewhere towards the middle of the 20th century. It was also around this time that offshore oil developments made states look seriously to protecting their previously mostly ignored continental shelf. The problem looked to be intractable given the failure of the first UN Conference on the Law of the Sea to produce an answer to the question of acceptable territorial sea limits. In this paper, I look to see how the rise in utilization of maritime resources impacted the likelihood of international maritime conflict, focusing in particular on offshore oil and gas. Did the rise in exploitation of these resources (or the fear of such) impact the likelihood of conflict? I examine data on maritime conflicts from the 20th century in the Issue Correlates of War project to determine what, if any, effect the rise of the offshore drilling industry had on the development of maritime conflict.