In yet another sign of thawing ties across the Taiwan Strait, the Wall Street Journal is reporting that two state-owned energy firms are to jointly explore for natural gas in the strait. China's CNOOC and Taiwan's CPC will jointly explore the northern end of the 180 km of the sea lane. A foreign partner might be invited to join in the exercise, the newspaper added.

The new joint project follows the failure of a 2002 CNOOC-CPC jv to to find gas in the southern tip of strait and the Chaozhou Shantou Basin off the coast of China's Guangdong province.