| Summary: | Western oil and gas technical journals as well as ordinary newspapers wax lyrical over the hydrocarbon resources of the Arctic, typically referring to it as the next global frontier. Huge resource estimates are bandied about – the USGS has suggested as much as 400 billion barrels oil equivalent remains to be discovered, with over 80 percent of that thought to lie in offshore fields. Equally, there are a growing number of conferences on Arctic Technology, many of them seemingly assuming that significant oil or gas discoveries will be made and therefore focussing on how to develop fields in seasonal ice, what to do about icebergs, pipeline routes and petroleum export. Of course, onshore Arctic exploration and development has a significant history, notably in Alaska and West Siberia, and there has been intermittent exploration in the Barents, southern Kara, Chukchi and Beaufort Seas, so there are many ideas – both conceptual and proven – to look at. Nevertheless, a significant part of the Arctic is represented by the largest shelf on Earth, the Eurasian epicontinental shelf, of which the major portion, amounting to some 3.5 million sq kms, is located in the Russian Arctic. As a calibration, this is an area roughly equivalent to 700 offshore Angola deepwater blocks or 152,000 Gulf of Mexico deepwater blocks! The area is, to a large extent, sparsely explored due to its harsh environment, high cost of operations and forbidding logistics.
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