Arctic: challenges and perspectives

There has been global interest in the exploitation of rich hydrocarbon resources in the Arctic for decades. However, recent low oil prices, a low carbon economy climate agenda, and technical challenges of Arctic oil extraction have curbed interest in these Arctic resources.

1. Oil and Gas Reserves in the Arctic

How much of world oil and gas reserves can be found within the Arctic? And how much remains to be found? The answer depends on how the Arctic is defined. None of the states that until now have been referred to as Arctic states is wholly “Arctic”. With the exception of Russia, which has most of her sea territory in the Arctic, the largest parts of the national territory of the four countries on which we have focused until now are located in the climatically temperate zone of the world.
The problem is that the most diligent search for a generally accepted definition of what constitutes the Arctic will fail. Several definitions may exist within a single country, and this state of affairs is not made clearer when the term Arctic is used interchangeably with other terms such as the North, High North, High Arctic, the Northern Areas, and the like. “The delimitation of the Arctic …varies depending upon the perspective from which one approaches it”1.
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2. Undiscovered Oil and Gas Resources in the Arctic

A great deal of the attention paid to Arctic resources stem from the promise of undiscovered hydrocarbon resources. In the year 2000 the US Geological Survey (USGS) assessed that 23.9% of the world’s undiscovered oil and gas resources were in the Arctic. In May 2008 the USGS completed a new assessment of the resources north of the Arctic Circle (Circum-Arctic Resource Appraisal, or CARA for short). Only those geologic areas were included which were considered “…to have at least a 10% chance of one or more significant oil and gas accumulations.
For the purposes of the study, a significant accumulation contains recoverable volumes of at least 50 million barrels of oil and/or oil-equivalent natural gas.
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3. Defining assessment units

Petroleum is overwhelmingly associated with sedimentary rocks. Therefore, a new map was assembled to delineate the Arctic sedimentary successions by age, thickness, and structural and tectonic setting. The map provided the basis for defining assessment units (AUs), which are mappable volumes of sedimentary rocks that share similar geological properties. The CARA defined 69 AUs, each containing more than 3 km of sedimentary strata, the probable minimum thickness necessary to bury petroleum source rocks sufficiently to generate significant petroleum. Areas outside the 69 AUs were interpreted to have low petroleum potential.
Geologic information about each AU was compiled from published literature and from data made available by cooperating organizations, including the Bundesanstalt für Geowissenschaften und Rohstoffe, the Geological Survey of Canada, the Geological Survey of Denmark and Greenland, the Norwegian Petroleum Directorate, and the U.S.
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CONCLUSION

Of the 6% of Earth’s surface encompassed by the Arctic Circle, one-third is above sea level and another third is in continental shelves beneath less than 500 m of water. The remainder consists of deep ocean basins historically covered by sea ice. Many onshore areas have already been explored; by 2007, more than 400 oil and gas fields, containing 40 billion barrels of oil (BBO), 1136 trillion cubic feet (TCF) of natural gas, and 8 billion barrels of natural gas liquids had been developed north of the Arctic Circle, mostly in the West Siberian Basin of Russia and on the North Slope of Alaska.
Deep oceanic basins have relatively low petroleum potential, but the Arctic continental shelves constitute one of the world’s largest remaining prospective areas. Until now, remoteness and technical difficulty, coupled with abundant low-cost petroleum, have ensured that little exploration occurred offshore.
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