• In autumn 2013, Russian energy giant Gazprom will be the first company ever to begin commercial drilling operations in ice infested waters above the Arctic Circle. • Gazprom is Russia’s biggest company, accounting for 10 % of national GDP, and is set to play a key role in President Vladimir Putin’...
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| Online Access: | http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.593.4099 http://www.greenpeace.org/international/Global/international/briefings/climate/Gazprom-Media-Brefing-Sep-2013-final.pdf |
| Summary: | • In autumn 2013, Russian energy giant Gazprom will be the first company ever to begin commercial drilling operations in ice infested waters above the Arctic Circle. • Gazprom is Russia’s biggest company, accounting for 10 % of national GDP, and is set to play a key role in President Vladimir Putin’s aim to make the country a global energy leader. • Opening up the offshore Arctic is central to Gazprom’s future energy strategy. The company openly admits it plans to drill in other Arctic basins and has already built another ice-class oil rig for this purpose. • In April Gazprom announced a strategic partnership with Royal Dutch Shell to drill in the Russian Arctic. The deal exposes Shell and its shareholders to all the risks associated with Gazprom’s management and safety culture. • Gazprom’s giant $4bn Prirazlomnaya platform could supply oil directly to the global market by early 2014, becoming the first Arctic offshore oil from ice covered waters to reach consumers. • The Prirazlomnaya has been constructed using pieces of decommissioned North Sea rigs and has sat rusting in a Murmansk shipyard for years. • Gazprom’s platform will operate year-round in the remote Pechora Sea, where ice is present for nearly two-thirds of the year and temperatures can drop as low as-50°C. • The Prirazlomnaya’s oil spill response plan is only publicly available as a short summary, but even this document shows that Gazprom will rely on traditional clean-up methods that simply do not work in icy conditions. • Much of the response equipment will be housed 1000km away in Murmansk, which means the company would not be able to mount a serious accident response for days. By this time oil could have beached on nearby nature reserves, and Gazprom admit local wildlife and Indigenous Peoples could be adversely affected. |
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