The World Wildlife Fund (WWF) said a deal last month allowing BP and Russian state-run major Rosneft access to untapped reserves in the Kara Sea violated the boundaries of two Russian national parks in one of the world’s last true wildernesses.

 The conservation group says the area licensed to the oil majors for exploration through to 2040 by the Russian government snips off some 45 square kilometers (17 square miles) of protected land.

 A WWF map shows the Novaya Zemlya archipelago enclosing the Kara Sea to the North and the Yamal Peninsula jutting into the sea’s southern shore could be threatened by the drilling.

 “Surely we are not so desperate for oil that we will tear down the boundaries of protected areas to get it,” Aleksey Knizhnikov of WWF-Russia said in a statement.

 “These protected areas are now in peril. The natural values they were set up to protect — pristine ecosystems, the seabirds, the polar bears, the marine mammals — are in jeopardy,” he added.

 BP said the two oil majors “believe that we can carry out this exploration programme safely and responsibly,” a spokesman for BP in Russia said by telephone.

 “Lessons learned from the Gulf of Mexico incident and spill will be carried through to this project,” he added.

 The two oil majors say the three Kara Sea blocks could contain oil reserves equal to the volumes of the UK North Sea, meaning a lucrative catch of around 60 billion barrels.

 But in the wake of BP’s catastrophic leak in the Gulf of Mexico this spring, experts warn the damage from drilling in the fragile Arctic ecosystem or oil leaks under the ice could be far worse than in warmer deepwater climates.

 The Russian Arctic park, designated by Prime Minister Vladimir Putin on Novaya Zemlya in 2009, is one of the most important breeding grounds for polar bears, a year-round haven for walrus and home to the rare narwhal and Greenland whale, according to the Russian ministry of natural resources.

WWF activists urged the Russian government to pause oil and gas exploration in the fragile Arctic until strict regulations and preventive measure are put in place to protect the region’s wildlife and fauna.

 “Parking oil rigs beside protected areas is definitely not going to help,” Alexander Shestakov, director of the WWF’s Global Arctic Programme, said in the statement.

 “In the light of the climate driven changes in this region, and across the Arctic, we need to be looking at ways in which we can help Arctic animals and peoples transition to a new and very different reality.”

 The Russian government, a majority shareholder in Rosneft, gets more than 50 percent of its revenues from oil and gas and Putin’s stated aim is to keep producing more than 10 billion barrels a day through 2020.

NOVO-OGARYOVO, January 15 (Itar-Tass) — BP and Rosneft will jointly develop oil and gas fields on the Russian Arctic shelf, and investments into the project will reach tens of billions of dollars, Prime Minister Vladimir Putin at a meeting with the leadership of the British Petroleum company.

The resources of oil in question stand at 5 billion tonnes, and those of gas, at 10 trillion cubic meters,” said Putin. “These are serious figures that need further confirmation, but they are quite realistic and I hope that these estimated resources will become proven reserves.”

He added that “such work would require an investment of tens of billions of dollars and advanced technologies.”

Russia will create a favorable tax regimen for the BP and Rosneft in their joint development of the Russian Arctic shelf, Putin said.

“The Russian government intends to create the most favorable tax treatment for this project,” he said.

He declared that the BP and Rosneft had achieved “far-reaching agreements on joint work in offshore projects in Russia and in third countries.”

“I want to inform you that the Russian government supports this joint work,” he continued. This work can acquire a large scale and have a significant impact on the world oil and gas industry.”

Putin said that the Russian side was aware of the fact that these companies may face some risks. “In this regard, we cannot but welcome the idea of establishing a special research center for offshore issues,” he said.

Putin also congratulated Rosneft and the BP upon growth in the prices of their shares.

“BP and Rosneft have started to grow,” he said. “I wish to congratulate you.”

About the oil spills in the Gulf of Mexico last year, Putin said: “There is a good saying – wit once bought is worth twice taught.”

“Our experts have scrutinized the tragedy, we know that BP was the organizer of the project, but there were also eight sub-contractors, including major U.S. companies,” Putin said. “This indicates that together, we must carefully analyze everything that happens from the beginning regarding offshore projects,” Putin said.

Rosneft is the leader of the Russian oil industry and one of the largest public oil and gas companies worldwide. The principal activities of Rosneft are exploration and production of oil and gas, production of petroleum products and petrochemicals, and marketing of these products. The company is on the list of strategic enterprises in Russia. Its major shareholder (75.16 percent of shares) is the company Rosneftegaz, 100 percent state-owned.

Rosneft has 22.9 billion barrels of proven reserves, which is one of the best indicators among the public oil and gas companies worldwide. By its reserves of liquid hydrocarbons Rosneft is the undisputed leader. Its current proven reserves are big enough to last 26 years, and most of its fields are classified as traditional, which makes it possible to effectively increase production.

The corporation British Petroleum is one of the largest oil companies in the world. Currently it is present in more than 100 countries, and its staff numbers more than 80 thousand. It is headquartered in London.

BP owns refineries and petrochemical enterprises and a network filling stations, and it produces oil and lubricants. It owns shares in ten pipelines and five regasification terminals in the North Sea, in a pipeline in Alaska, as well as in several terminals for liquefied natural gas in the Gulf of Mexico. Currently, BP produces about 4 million barrels of oil per day, which is about 5 percent of total global daily production.

In Russia, BP is a co-owner of the oil company TNK-BP on a par with Russia’s Alfa-Access-Renova. TNK-BP, formed in 2003, is one of the leading oil companies in Russia and among the ten largest private oil companies in the world in terms of crude oil production. TNK-BP produces 60-70 million tonnes of oil annually, accounting for 23 percent of the total production of British Petroleum. “

The country needs a “comprehensive threat and vulnerability assessment” that not only examines northern vulnerability to threats like terrorism and illegal shipping, but also investigates how economic development can influence security, the Conference Board of Canada suggests in Security in Canada’s North: Looking Beyond Arctic Sovereignty.

The security of the vast northern stretches of the country has gained importance in recent years, as diamonds and hydrocarbons show economic potential while the retreating polar ice cap opens shipping routes. An intelligence assessment uncovered last week said organized crime and human traffickers have already attempted Arctic forays.

But the Conference Board suggests Canada look beyond establishing military sovereignty and consider instead the well-being of northerners, something the report terms “community security.”

That means working to protect northerners from “the widest possible range of threats and hazards,” author Bjorn Rutten wrote.

“To those living in the North, security concerns are likely to focus on the capacity of communities to meet the basic needs of their inhabitants and to become more resilient.”

Parts of the North continue to confront a lack of work, poor housing, high crime rates and the difficulties of providing good roads, water, education and health to isolated outposts. When industrial projects like new mines are approved, community infrastructure is often not upgraded to support the increased activity.

And in a part of the country where the elements are fierce, help usually comes from Trenton, Ont., which is roughly the same distance from Canadian Force Station Alert, on Ellesmere Island, as it is from Bogota, Colombia.

It is these issues that pose the “greatest threats to the security and resilience of Canada’s northern communities,” Mr. Rutten finds.

Some believe the greatest threats to the North are from outside, and we need a military to protect against rogue tankers or terrorists. But Rob Huebert, associate director of the University of Calgary’s Centre for Military and Strategic Studies, said Canada should be asking not only how it can hold onto the North, but why.

“Everything we’re doing in preparation for the new Arctic that’s arriving on our doorstep – we’re doing it in the context of preparing it for the betterment of Canadians, and in particular northern Canadians,” he said.

The North has recently found itself the object of much federal attention. Yet funding has yet to materialize to build a long slate of pledged projects, such as ice-strengthened navy ships, a deep-sea port on Baffin Island, an Arctic army training centre and a Far North research centre.

Still, the Harper government has created a Northern Economic Development Agency and “the Prime Minister himself has been talking about the importance of social and economic development as a component of Canada’s northern strategy,” said Michael Byers, global politics and international law chair at the University of British Columbia.

But, he said, Ottawa has been loath to dedicate the kind of funds that would help alleviate problems with housing and education in places like Nunavut, where strides in Inuktitut-language instruction could enable a more prosperous future. Even a multibillion-dollar investment would pale compared to the value of northern Canada’s resources, he said.

This report was first covered by The Globe and Mail.

YUZHNO-SAKHALINSK, Russia — When writer Anton Chekhov arrived on the Russian island of Sakhalin in 1890, he was overwhelmed by the harsh conditions at the Tsarist penal colony. It wasn’t just the floggings, forced prostitution and ill-treatment of children in the colony. It was the environment itself. “There is no climate on Sakhalin, just nasty weather,” Chekhov wrote. “And this Island is the foulest place in all of Russia.”

More than a century on, Sakhalin’s prisoners have been replaced by oil and gas workers, most of whom seem to agree that Chekhov’s description still fits.

The sparsely populated island — which is the length of Britain — has some of the most extreme weather on earth. Marine cyclones and violent snowstorms rip through its forested hills, and the ocean waters off its northern coast freeze solid for a good part of the year. In winter, temperatures drop to minus 40 Celsius and snow can pile three meters high.

Workers at Exxon’s Odoptu oil field, eight km (five miles) off the northeast coast of Sakhalin, had to shovel their way out of their dormitory last winter to clear pipe valves and free oil pipelines of snow. “The blizzards were so bad that at one point we had to evacuate half of the staff,” says Pavel Garkin, head of the field’s operations.

Now Moscow hopes to attract global oil players to another extreme location: its icy Arctic waters. Shared by Canada, Denmark, Iceland, Norway, Russia and the United States, the Arctic may hold around one-fifth of the world’s untapped oil and gas reserves according to a U.S. Geological survey. The past few years have seen a rush of activity in the region, with UK oil explorer Cairn Energy drilling for oil off the west coast of Greenland and Norway’s Statoil, one of the world’s largest offshore oil producers, pushing further and further up the Nordic country’s serpentine coastline, drilling wells inside the Arctic Circle beneath both the Norwegian and Barents Seas.

In September, Russia and Norway put an end to a 40-year dispute over maritime boundaries in the Barents Sea, freeing Russia to push for increased exploration under its portion of the waters just three years after the country spelled out its Arctic claim by planting a rust-proof flag on the sea bed more than four km (14,000 ft) under the North Pole.

The rewards could be huge. Russia, the world’s top oil producer with output of more than 10 million barrels of oil per day (bpd), estimates that its Arctic zone holds around 51 billion tonnes of oil, or enough to fully meet global oil demand for more than four years, as well as 87 trillion cubic meters of natural gas. Unlike Norway, Russia is not currently producing in its Arctic offshore, but the country’s Natural Resource Ministry says it wants to invest at least $312.8 billion by 2039 to explore the shelf. Most of this money will go to the Arctic.

But even as Russia opens its northern waters to exploration, there’s reason to pause. In the wake of BP’s catastrophic leak in the Gulf of Mexico this spring, Russian officials and experts warn an oil spill under the ice could turn out far worse than one in warmer deepwater climates. Arctic conditions — remoteness, fragile ecosystems, darkness, sub-zero temperatures, ice, high winds — make dealing with an oil spill a massive task.

At an annual conference for global oil and gas heavyweights held on Sakhalin at the end of September, Russian government officials and offshore industry professionals paid close attention to the dangers of drilling on the Arctic continental shelf. “I have attended 13 of the 14 Sakhalin oil conferences, and this is the first where government regulators were visibly and vocally concerned about offshore oil spill risks,” says Michael Bradshaw, an expert on Russia’s Far East energy industry and professor at the University of Leicester.

It’s not that a spill is more likely in the Arctic than in a warmer, deep-water locale, says Nils Masvie, a director at Norwegian offshore risk-assessment firm Det Norske Veritas. “But you cannot extrapolate and say the risk is the same in a cold climate. No, the risk is higher.”

That’s because it’s so much harder to manage a spill and offshore emergency in the ice and dark. “Sometimes search and rescue operations stop in the evening because it is too dark, resuming again at eight o’clock when the light returns. But if something happens on the Arctic Barents Sea in November it would be, ‘OK, we’ll come back for you in March,’” says Masvie, whose company verifies and certifies equipment used in offshore oil and gas production, such as the Nord Stream gas pipeline being built under the Baltic Sea for Russian gas giant Gazprom.

LESSONS FROM KOMI

Russia’s track record with oil spills does not inspire confidence.

During the 1970s oil boom, primitive production, drilling and pipeline technology caused pollution levels in rivers, oceans, lakes and ground water to soar. In 1975, for example, several large West Siberian rivers that run north through Russia’s biggest oil production region and empty into the Arctic Ocean had oil concentrations 21 times the maximum permissible level, according to a government report, “Status of Environmental Pollution in the USSR 1975-1976″. Scientists attributed the large-scale contamination to the widespread use of such unsophisticated oil production practices as intense water flooding, where workers inject water into wells at high pressures to drive out the oil. Most pipes also lacked leak-detection technology.

One of the worst spills occurred in August, 1994, when the aging pipeline network in the northern Komi Republic sprang a leak.

The oil spill was officially put at 79,000 tonnes, or 585,000 barrels, though independent estimates put it at up to 2 million barrels. At the high end that would have been half as big as BP’s 4 million barrel Gulf disaster. Two months after the spill started, heavy rains broke a dam that contained the oil, releasing a massive slick into rivers and across forested tundra near the city of Usinsk.

Komi borders the Arctic Circle where the cold makes it hard for oil to evaporate. The oil that didn’t immediately spill into the Arctic Ocean-bound Kolva, Usa and Pechora rivers spread over 186 sq km (72 square miles) of marshland and tundra. There it froze during winter months, according to an environmental case study by the American University in Washington.

The following spring, the oil from the frozen tundra washed back into the streams, seeping into the surrounding vegetation or traveling further down the Pechora to empty into the Barents Sea. A Greenpeace witness reported that April, “as we feared, the spring has brought a deadly tide of oil over the area. There are acres and acres of blackened marshland, and every river and stream has oil in it.”

Geopolis, an environmental consultancy commissioned by the Russian government to conduct a detailed examination of the spill, warned that the local environment near Usinsk would be “significantly impacted” by the spring ice thaw. Ecosystems with only a thin “active” layer of soil above permafrost typically have slow growth rates and are particularly sluggish at filtering out pollutants.

“Following disturbance, recovery is slow because of the short growing season and low annual production of nutrients,” the World Conservation Union explains in its Environmental Guidelines for Oil and Gas Production in the Arctic.

Water bodies in cold climates are just as vulnerable. “The chemistry of large Arctic lakes is unusual because of the near-absence of annual cycles of nutrients and micro-organisms and the low quantities of dissolved solids,” the guidelines state.

Smaller oil spills have occurred in the same region almost annually since the 1994 accident, some documented by Russian oil giant LUKOIL, which bought the Komi oil company in 1999, and by Russia’s environmental agencies. Others have been spotted only by green groups and citizens’ organizations.

“Each spring when the Kolva (River) thaws, the bottom of the ice comes up black,” says Nikolai Feyodorov, who lives in the village of Ust-Usa. “It happens every year, around May. I haven’t caught a clean ide (fish) even from streams in 20 years.”

LUKOIL, which counts Komi as one of its biggest oil-producing regions, says it spent 4.6 billion roubles ($150 million) between 2000 and 2005 to clean up, re-cultivate and reforest over 10 sq km (3.9 square miles) of polluted land. The company recycled more than 230,000 tonnes of oil waste, it says, and replaced 878 km (546 miles) of old pipeline. Following the clean-up the area was taken off Russia’s list of environmental disaster zones. By comparison, BP’s latest estimate of the total likely cost of its Gulf of Mexico spill was $40 billion.

LUKOIL concedes Komi’s climate is a problem for monitoring pipeline leaks, and says it would be impossible to replace the entire pipeline system, which was built in the 1970s and is thousands of km long.

“It’s a very harsh climate,” a LUKOIL press secretary told Reuters. “Most of the year it is freezing, and when there is a lot of snow and everything is covered in ice you don’t see the leaks and this makes monitoring difficult. The snow melts in June, and the oil can be seen mostly in streams. This is not a secret.”

WORSE IN THE ARCTIC

Environmental groups agree and say the Komi disaster is further proof of how hard it would be to deal with an oil spill in Arctic seas. “If companies can’t handle 50 meters of frozen mass, how could you expect them to handle a spill on open ocean in Sakhalin or the Arctic?” says Vladimir Chuprov, Greenpeace’s top energy specialist in Russia.

“Cleaning up oil under ocean ice is impossible. You would have to break and remove thousands of tonnes of ice as the oil keeps moving with the currents further out into the ocean.”

Stanislav Meshryakov, head of the department for environmental matters in heavy industry at Russia’s Gubkin University of Oil and Gas, concurs. “The conditions on an open, uncovered surface of water are well understood. But under ice, a slick gets trapped, the current takes it away but you can’t see how far, where to, how deep,” Meshryakov told Reuters in a phone interview.

The standard procedure for an under-ice spill is to cut a wide band of ice around the affected area to expose the water. As in oil spills in warmer waters, the contained oil can then be mechanically removed using booms and skimmers, burned, or dispersed using chemicals sprayed from a helicopter.

“You must have special machinery, and it is a long process. By the time the hole is cut, the heavy oil fractions would have sunk down and been carried away by currents, and the light ones stick to the underside of the ice,” says Meshryakov.

In Russia, the State Marine Emergency and Rescue Administration, responsible for leading all oil spill response operations at sea, keeps a stock of oil recovery equipment at Russia’s nine major ports, harbors and terminals. The port of Murmansk on the Barents Sea has specialized Arctic vessels and ice-breaker escorts.

In the United States, the Coast Guard, oil companies and their contracted emergency responders are required to stockpile clean-up equipment and technology engineered to withstand Arctic conditions. But even with all that preparation, conditions severely limit how effectively equipment can be transported and deployed, creating what the industry calls a “response gap.”

An added problem, according to a report on Arctic spill response challenges by the World Wildlife Fund, is that sea ice can move or damage oil containment booms. Skimmers can freeze or get clogged by ice chunks, while slush ice can prevent burning fluid from igniting the oil in burn operations.

To create a stronger, more realistic Arctic oil-spill response plan, the WWF recommends being more realistic about the limitations of equipment. “This assessment requires analysis and study of the response equipment and procedures beyond stating that they are present on-scene and citing manufacturer ratings; the effectiveness of the system in actual conditions that may exist in the likely operating environment must be demonstrated.”

Norway, which has some of the world’s toughest oil safety regulations, learned to do this the hard way. In 1977 a blowout on the offshore Ekofisk platform gushed crude for eight days, releasing 202,381 barrels of oil in the North Sea’s largest ever spill. The poor performance of the equipment was one of the reasons the spill was so damaging.

Immediately following the disaster, in 1978, the country created the Norwegian Clean Seas Association for Operating Companies, which has focused on improving oil spill response technology and so far prevented any repeat of the Ekofisk disaster. As Norwegian firms prepare for more drilling in the Arctic, the association has developed new operating systems and equipment that will help run clean up operations even when it’s dark.

A POST-BP PAUSE

Following the blowout at BP’s Macondo well, many Arctic oil- producing countries including Russia have revisited their safety and drilling regulations.

The Obama administration decided to put a hold on offshore drilling in Alaska until at least 2011 as it reviews its safety and environmental regulations. In September, White House oil spill commission co-chair Bill Reilly said the BP spill had shown that even in a warm-water climate, advances in spill response and clean-up technology have not kept pace with offshore development.

Before the Gulf spill, Obama had proposed ending the drilling moratorium in territorial waters and opening up the Chukchi and Beaufort Seas in the Arctic Ocean to exploration and development. But the U.S. Interior Department has now stopped issuing new drilling permits in the Arctic, and adopted a more cautious approach to development in the region because of its unique environmental conditions. A court ruling has also blocked any Chukchi Sea drilling in the near future.

Canada said in August that while its offshore safety regulations are adequate and no drilling moratorium is necessary, it will investigate if more safeguards, such as relief wells, are needed and will consider raising the liability cap for operators. Ottawa has also asked Greenland to provide it with more information on the offshore licenses it has issued for drilling in the Davis Strait, part of the North Atlantic Ocean that separates Greenland, a self-governing territory of Denmark, from Canada.

Canada, along with Denmark, is a designated oil-spill responder for Greenland, which according to the WWF has none of its own emergency oil-spill equipment stockpiles.

Norway, the world’s No. 5 oil exporter, whose powerful oil industry is looking to expand drilling in the Arctic archipelagos of Lofoten and Vesteraalen, has said it will not issue new deepwater licenses until the government fully investigates what the BP well blowout means for its own regulations.

In Russia, Putin’s administration drafted a new bill on oil spill removal that, if passed by the state Duma, would overhaul Russia’s safety and environmental regulations. Oil companies say Russia already has some of the tightest regulations in the world, but point out that they are inconsistently applied and often open to corruption.

Exxon’s Odoptu operation started producing only two months ago. But the road to it from the northern town of Okha — whose municipal emblem is a seagull flying over an oil rig — is flanked by the telltale signs of oil-related degradation from earlier work by other operators: evidence, locals say, of the lax regulatory regime.

Even before a pair of abandoned oil rigs appears on the horizon, the flaxen sand dunes take on a darker color and the scrub and dwarf pines that dominate the coastal landscape lose their natural evergreen hue. Further on, several rigs pump away, their jacks rhythmically rapping the sand for oil like woodpeckers on a tree for bugs. An oily sheen gives the scrubland a charred look.

NEW REGULATIONS PROPOSED

But even if operators aren’t ready for an Arctic oil spill, don’t expect the post-BP pause to last forever. Norway and Russia’s recent detente over maritime boundaries has both countries pushing for more exploration in the region.

Norway plans to auction off 51 new blocks in its part of the Barents Sea for oil and gas exploration [ID:nLDE65M0VK], while Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin and Russian energy officials hope to see more offshore oil exploration in its part of the Sea. Under current legislation only Gazprom and Rosneft have the right to develop Russia’s continental shelf, but as of January 1, Moscow will open it up to foreign producers. [ID:nLDE68S0RB]

Rosneft is already talking to Western oil and gas majors with experience in offshore drilling, including BP and France’s Total with a view to forming joint ventures in the Arctic.

In a recent interview, Rosneft’s vice president Peter O’Brien said the capital investment in Arctic offshore development was so high foreign investors were not interested in signing up unless Russia switched to a profit-based tax regime, which would tax a producer’s excess profits on oil production and move away from differentiated taxes adopted by the government for different oil fields.

“For folks to take even exploration risk, some of the partners are requesting clarity on taxation. If changes happen in the legislation then we will consider new structures that optimize the situation under the new legislation,” he said.

And it’s not just tax that foreign firms worry about. In December 2006, Shell and its Japanese partners ceded control of their $22-billion oil and gas project on Sakhalin to their junior partners Gazprom, after facing months of intense regulatory pressure. Before Gazprom took the reigns and Shell reduced its stake to 27.5 percent, Russia’s environmental watchdog, Rosprirodnadzor, threatened to hit the foreign operators with billions of dollars in fines for ecological violations. Many analysts have described the ecological campaign as a drive by the Russian state to take back control of a lucrative energy concession.

Could new regulations be used to do the same thing, or is the government honest in its attempt to improve conditions around Russian oil wells? Under the proposed regulations, Moscow wants all oil companies and related organizations dealing with oil transport, marketing and storage to create an oil-spill response plan (OSR) for each deposit and installation they operate.

“This certainly is a first step, and I want to believe that it will work,” says Nina Lesikhina, a Russian oil and gas specialist at the Norwegian environmental non-governmental group Bellona. “The new rules provide for much more control over a company’s emergency response. As they are now, there is little oversight.”

INADEQUATE

But Lesikhina and others remain critical of the Russian bill for lowballing the flow rate that the companies will use to figure out what equipment they need on-hand in the event of a spill. According to the bill, the maximum volume of oil companies drilling offshore would need to account for in their emergency response plan is 5,000 tonnes (36,650 barrels). “This is completely inadequate. In the Gulf of Mexico 50,000 barrels were being spilled each day,” says Lesikhina.

The bill, drafted by the Natural Resource Ministry, also states that a company’s emergency oil spill response would be considered finished when the spill is controlled and all the oil collected and disposed of properly. “There is no mention of remaining environmental damage after the oil is cleaned up. The companies don’t have to account for this financially or logistically in their oil response plan,” Lesikhina says. The Natural Resource Ministry said it could not immediately respond to questions.

The State Duma’s Natural Resource Committee is also in the process of drafting a new law entitled “The Protection of the Russian Federation’s Seas from Oil Pollution,” which the head of Russia’s WWF climate and energy division, Alexei Kokorin, says is a much better alternative to the one proposed by the Natural Resource Ministry.

“This bill works on the principle of precaution and prevention, is much more technical, stringent, and will bring the law into accordance with international norms,” says Kokorin.

But it’s unlikely that any new rules will severely restrict operators: the Russian government gets more than 50 percent of its revenues from oil and gas and Prime Minister Putin’s stated aim is to keep producing more than 10 billion barrels a day through 2020. “In Russia, the oil and gas industry is king,” says Kokorin.

Take Exxon’s Russian subsidiary, ENL (Exxon Neftegaz Ltd). If all goes well, it will soon be producing 30,000 bpd at the Odoptu field. But during the Sakhalin oil and gas conference, ENL’s environmental protection manager, Alexander Ponomarev, could not say whether the company had a specific plan for under-ice spills.

“We are studying the issue and looking for solutions,” Ponomarev told Reuters. “We can’t have the magic answer.”
Source: Financialpost.com

And as a rapidly warming Arctic encourages more ship traffic through Canada’s Northwest Passage and along other polar routes, the sooty emissions from passing freighters will significantly accelerate climate change in the region, according to a new Canadian-American study that, for the first time, predicts the potential impact of engine exhaust particles on the Arctic environment.

“One of the most potent ‘short-lived climate forcers’ in diesel emissions is black carbon, or soot,” says the study’s lead author, James Corbett, a University of Delaware marine scientist. “Ships operating in or near the Arctic use advanced diesel engines that release black carbon into one of the most sensitive regions for climate change.”

The study, published in the latest issue of the journal Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics, includes findings from three other U.S. scientists, as well as B.C.-based Transport Canada researcher Susie Harder and Ottawa-based researcher Maya Gold of the Canadian Coast Guard.

The researchers estimate that about two per cent of current global ship traffic will be diverted to the Arctic by 2030 and that the figure could rise to five per cent by 2050.

A major concern among scientists has been the environmental effect of pumping pollutants directly into the Arctic region, where exhaust impurities released by the burning of ships’ bunker fuel are known to elevate ambient air and ice temperatures.

Soot-stained snow and ice absorb more of the sun’s heat, reducing the “albedo” effect that normally allows light-coloured surfaces to reflect solar energy and keep their cool.

The study team’s key conclusion, based on the modelling of future emissions in the region, is that “short-lived forcing of about 4.5 gigatons of black carbon from Arctic shipping may increase the global warming potential due to ships’ carbon dioxide emissions by some 17 to 78 per cent.”

The researchers acknowledged that a potential rerouting of ship traffic to the Arctic from longer, southern trade routes could substantially reduce fuel use by seagoing vessels and cut their global carbon output.

But how the transfer of short-term pollutants to the hyper-sensitive Arctic environment and how the change would affect the planet’s wider climate systems requires much more analysis by international scientists, the team argues.

They want Canada and the other Arctic Council nations to review the latest data to help form policies concerning climate change and polar shipping.

Earlier this year, a U.S. study probing the role of soot emissions in driving global climate change highlighted the severe impact that black carbon in the air and dirty snow on the Earth’s surface have in melting Arctic sea ice.

During a 10-year investigation detailed in the latest issue of the Journal of Geophysical Research, Stanford University scientist Mark Jacobson isolated the widespread warming effects from all sources of soot — the visible residue of burned wood, crops, oil, biomass and other fuels — from the climate impacts caused by greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide and methane.

He concluded that soot is currently the No. 2 driver of climate change — behind CO2 but ahead of methane — and that curbing emissions of black carbon would produce the fastest, most effective and most affordable international response to climate change and the shrinking of the Arctic sea ice.

“Controlling soot may be the only method of significantly slowing Arctic warming within the next two decades,” Jacobson said at the time.

In 2007, the U.S. scientists behind another study of soot’s climate impact identified Canada as key to any global effort to reduce the effect of black carbon emissions.

One of the co-authors, University of California researcher Charlie Zender, said at the time that fallen soot had the effect of “placing tiny toaster ovens into the snow pack.”

That study found that about 80 per cent of soot came from man-made sources and 20 per cent from forest fires.

Zender said at the time that although all nations contribute to the problem of snow impurity through the long-range transport of pollutants, Canada bears particular responsibility to push for cleaner-burning fuels and reduced industrial emissions of soot.

“Just as Brazil is the custodian of the Amazon, a world resource whose deforestation has all sorts of negative consequences, so is Canada a custodian of an important swath of snow-covered land that helps to cool the planet,” he stated.

He also raised a red flag at the time about increased ship traffic through the Northwest Passage.

“One implication,” he warned three years ago, “is that any increase in shipping through the Arctic Ocean — for example, the Northwest Passage — is likely to exacerbate these effects by putting soot emissions right in the middle of the remaining snow and sea ice. We must think very carefully about this.”

The Baffin Fisheries Coalition says its turbot and shrimp fishing seasons have lengthened dramatically in the past decade because of a warming Arctic climate.

“Of course it’s a concern, but there are pluses and minuses to everything, I guess. From a fishing perspective, I’m not concerned — I’m very excited. It’s very positive,” Jerry Ward, the coalition’s chief operating officer, told CBC News.

Off the northern coast of Baffin Island, the fishing season started about a month earlier than it would have 10 years ago. Ward said the same changes have applied off southern Baffin Island, which saw a record 10-month-long season in 2007.

“It’s a good thing because if you start earlier, you take the uncertainty out of your business from the planning perspective,” he said. “These are large vessels, and we find something else for them to do in the winter months.”

Ward said the coalition has also seen more capelin fish that could lure more cod and other larger fish farther north. Overall, the ability to stay out on the water longer can mean fishing crews can meet their turbot and shrimp quotas faster, he said.

Dangerous conditions

At the same time, Ward said there are numerous downsides to climate change in the North, as there have been more severe thunderstorms that would create dangerous fishing conditions. As well, he said climate change has created hazards for Inuit living on Baffin Island.

“From a traditional way of life, from an Inuit perspective, it is of major concern because of the breaking up of the ice and that sort of thing, and the danger of travelling on the ice, and so on,” he said.

Concerns in Nunavut about warming air temperatures, receding sea ice and record-low snowfall have been backed up by a report released last week by an international team of climate scientists.

The new Arctic Report Card, released Thursday, “tells a story of widespread, continued and even dramatic effects of a warming Arctic,” said Jackie Richter-Menge of the Cold Regions Research and Engineering Laboratory, a U.S. Army Corps of Engineers facility.

“This isn’t just a climatological effect. It impacts the people that live there,” she added.

‘Running for the hills’

The Arctic Report Card says warming has taken place at a near-record pace in the first half of 2010, with monthly readings over 4 C above normal in Northern Canada.

Atmospheric scientists concerned about global warming have focused on the Arctic because that is a region where some effects are expected to be felt first.

“One thing we have to face up to is that rates of sea-level rise are probably going to be increasing into the future and ultimately, for some people, that is going to mean running for the hills, literally,” Martin Sharp, a professor of earth and atmospheric sciences at the University of Alberta, told CBC News.

“When they run, of course, they have to go somewhere else, so there are also implications for the communities that have to accommodate refugees.”

Sharp, one of several Canadian contributors to the Arctic Report Card, said the findings could focus more scientific and political attention on the Canadian Arctic.

Climate change is bringing vast change to the Arctic, and previous ice-covered areas are becoming more accessible for shipping. Russia, for one, is making an aggressive push to establish new sea lanes on top of the world.

The advent of Russian shipping across the Arctic is of particular concern to Alaska and the U.S. The 56-mile wide strait lies between northwestern Alaska and Siberia, separating the North American and Asian continents and connecting the Bering Sea to the Arctic Ocean.

- The Bering Strait will end up becoming a significant marine highway in the future, and we’re seeing it with Russia, the way they are promoting this maritime transportation route above Russia right now, today, Colvin told The Associated Press in an interview recently, National Public Radio reports.

Rear Admiral Christopher C. Colvin is commander of the Seventeenth Coast Guard District headquartered in Juneau, Alaska, and is responsible for all Coast Guard operations throughout Alaska and the Alaskan maritime. The Seventeenth Coast Guard District includes portions of the North Pacific Ocean, the Arctic Ocean and the Bering Sea and encompasses an area approximately the size of the continental United States.

Alaska has more coastline than the rest of the United States combined.

The admiral calls for new icebreakers and new bases in the Arctic. According to Colvin, the U.S. Coast Guard has three icebreakers, of which only one — the Healy — is operational. The two other icebreakers, the Polar Sea and the Polar Star are undergoing repairs and will be back in service in 2011 and 2013, respectively.

The U.S. Coast Guard also needs a base in northern Alaska since the closest base is in Kodiak, about 1,000 miles to the south, Colvin said. He suggested building a base in Barrow, the nation’s northernmost city, with a hangar large enough to house a Coast Guard C-130 Hercules aircraft and H60 helicopters.

Greenland’s foreign minister responded to the allegations by accusing European countries which are pushing for a ban on deep-water drilling of suffering “panic reactions” after the Gulf of Mexico oil spill. Wallis, however, said at the meeting at Cambridge University this week that wider participation in the Arctic Council must become a reality.

“It’s got to be widened out. If we don’t do things then people will take to the streets to make sure something is done over climate change,” she said in a report by the Guardian.

Interest in the Arctic region has increased in recent years as global warming has triggered a race for natural resources that have long been trapped under the ice. Oil companies have already started to drill in the area, including Edinburgh-based Cairn Energy which announced two new oil and gas “shows” of the coast of Greenland in the past month.

The EU has, however, been pressing for a ban on deep water drilling since the BP blow-out earlier this year in the Gulf of Mexico.

Greenland’s deputy foreign minister, Inuuteq Holm Oslen, said he is suspicious about the motives behind such “green” concerns.

“We welcome focus and attention on environmental issues […] What we don’t welcome is the notion that there should not be any industrial development in the name of environmental protection. What the rest of you have been benefiting from should not be denied to us in the Arctic,” he said.

ST. PETERSBURG, October 8 (Itar-Tass) — The deployment of the North Pole 38 drifting research station has begun from the Rossiya nuclear-powered icebreaker. The ice block for North Pole 38 was selected on Monday, chief engineer of the Arctic and Antarctic Research Institute of the Federal Hydro-Meteorological Service Arkady Soshnikov told Itar-Tass on Tuesday.

The ice block is drifting at 76 degrees North 175 degrees West. The air temperatures are around minus 6-9 degrees Centigrade. The visibility is good but weathermen do not rule out the arrival of a cyclone that may complicate logistic operations.

“A helicopter will carry about 300 tonnes of cargo to the ice block. These include 20 prefabs, two tractors, snow tractors, scientific equipment, diesel fuel and food for 15 polar explorers, whose mission will last for about a year,” he said.

The landing operation will last through the end of this week. Once the Russian flag is hoisted on the ice block, the Rossiya will head for Murmansk, Soshnikov said.

The North Pole 38 expedition started from Murmansk in the small morning hours of October 2, Arctic expedition supervisor Vladimir Sokolov told Itar-Tass.

The Rossiya brought the North Pole 37 crew to Murmansk in June. The crewmembers had to unload 29 prefabs, four diesel power plants, three tractors, four snow tractors, diesel fuel and North Pole 37 litter before going home.

“The North Pole 37 crew did colossal work within nine months. They conducted weather, aerological and oceanographic studies, as well as monitored dynamics and thickness of Arctic ice, measured its hydro-physical parameters and evaluated the CO2 percentage in the ocean,” Sokolov said.

The crew tested the Glonass satellite navigation system and compared Glonass data with that of GPS.

The Rossiya expedition was organized to evacuate the North Pole 37 crew. The evacuation started on June 1 and ended on June 7.

The ice block was cleaned spick and span, as it was necessary to take away everything, just like it was done in the evacuation of the North Pole 35 and the North Pole 36. The icebreaker took aboard 15 Russian polar explorers and about 200 tonnes of cargo, from research instruments to litter. The loading started with a bulldozer and two prefabs.

The evacuation of the North Pole 37 was a round-the-clock affair. The expedition members were divided the expedition into three shifts, which were working for four hours and had an eight-hour break.

Before the icebreaker arrived, a Mil Mi-8 helicopter had made a reconnaissance flight to choose the best place for mooring and to trace the cargo and vehicles scattered around the split ice block.

“The ice block, on which the polar explorers had been drifting, had plenty of cracks. The satellite imagers and photos supplied by a drone did not provide the full picture. We evaluated the damage in full only after the arrival. The cracks did not endanger the explorers’ health or life, but it was high time to evacuate the expedition,” Sokolov said.

The icebreaker departed from Murmansk in the small morning hours of May 16.

“The North Pole 37 ice block had been passing through a drift-divide, which caused inevitable dynamic changes. The area of the ice block reduced to the minimal space required for the research camp, and the dynamic processes went on. Thus, it was decided to send the icebreaker for the evacuation of the crew,” Sokolov said.

The crew continued the planned research despite force majeure circumstances, he said. The information will help update maps of the Arctic Ocean.

“Research done at drifting stations in recent years shows that oceanic depths differ up to 1,000 meters in certain areas, especially around undersea ridges. The measuring of oceanic depths will update maps and contribute to the evaluation of external boundaries of the Russian continental shelf,” he said.

“A day of a modern drifting research station’s work supplies as much as information as a Soviet drifting research station used to supply in a year. Present-day crews use modern digital measuring systems, which monitor conditions of the atmosphere, the oceanic ice, the waters and the oceanic bottom,” he said.

The North Pole 37 began a yearlong mission in early September 2009.

“The Russian state flag was hoisted on the drifting ice block on September 7,” a source at the Federal Hydro-Meteorological Service told Itar-Tass. The crew arrived by the Yamal nuclear-powered icebreaker. The ice block was located at 81.27 North, 162.28 West at the landing moment.

The vessel delivered more than 150 tonnes of cargo, including 29 residential and auxiliary prefabs, four diesel power plants, three DT-75 tractors and four Buran snow vehicles. Diesel fuel was stored in several depots. There are several storages for food, as well.

The North Pole 37 expedition was making weather, aerological, glacial and oceanographic monitoring, as well as watching environmental pollution. A broad range of processes influencing intensive climate change in central Arctic region, including Russia’s Arctic coastline, has been studied.

Before launching the new expedition, the Yamal icebreaker picked up the crew of the North Pole 36.

The North Pole 36 crew departed from Arkhangelsk onboard the Academician Fyodorov in the middle of last August 2008, and the research station opened on September 7, 2008. The team of 18 scientists and experts had a yearlong mission in the Arctic Ocean. Two German colleagues joined them briefly in spring. Some 200 million rubles were assigned for the North Pole 36 drifting research station, Sokolov said.

”These are rather large federal budgetary allocations, especially as the North Pole 33 station received only 70 million rubles,” he said. Five ministries and ten large research institutes are engaged in the North Pole project, he said.

The Arctic research done by the team of the North Pole drifting station is stipulated by the national program of the International Polar Year.

The national program aims to collect new information about the environment of circumpolar areas, including that about morphometrics, structure and local dynamics of the ice shield and systemic monitoring of meteorological and radiation processes in the atmosphere – snow – sea ice – upper sea layer system. Much attention is being given to changes in Arctic eco-systems, sea bottom topography and silt structures, the professor said.

The idea to launch the first Soviet drifting research station was generated at the Arctic Research Institute in the polar research capital, St. Petersburg, in 1929. The Arctic basin with an area of 5-6 million square kilometers was a blank spot back then. The idea was implemented only in 1937, when the first expedition team led by Otto Schmidt landed on a drifting ice platform from an aircraft. The expedition included Ivan Papanin, Ernst Krenkel, Pyotr Shirshov and Yevgeny Fyodorov. They drifted about 2,500 kilometers from the North Pole to the southern area of the Greenland Sea, where they were met by icebreakers, within nine months.

The all-year-round monitoring of the Arctic Ocean started in 1950, when the North Pole 2 expedition of Mikhail Somov began. Since that time the former Soviet Union had two or even three permanent drifting research stations in the Arctic Ocean until July 1991, when the North Pole 31 project was accomplished.

The North Pole 32 station was launched in 2001 after a long pause in the Arctic research and promoted keen interest in the Arctic Ocean. Russia resumed systemic studies of nature in the most difficult of access area of the polar zone.

The drift of North Pole 35 began on September 21, 2007, 65 miles away from the Northern Land archipelago at 81.26 North Latitude, 103.30 East Longitude.

The North Pole 35 crew was evacuated on July 15, and the Mikhail Somov accompanied with the Arktika nuclear-powered icebreaker headed back for Arkhangelsk on July 16.

“The resumption of the Arctic research from a drifting block of ice after a 12-year pause revived the keen interest in the Arctic basin. The information collected by three North Pole stations will broaden the knowledge of processes underway in the central Arctic region, help explain causes of global climate changes and improve the quality of weather forecasts,” Sokolov said.

The well, in the Sivulliq prospect about 15 miles off Alaska’s North Slope, will be drilled in about 120 feet of water. The Noble Discoverer rig is lined up for the job, but a second rig has been stationed in Dutch Harbor to be on hand to drill a relief well in the event of a blowout or other accident.

In 2009, the government approved Shell’s offshore Alaska plan for exploration, which included drilling in the Chukchi Sea, but environmental and community groups challenged the decision. The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals upheld the plan in May, but the federal drilling moratorium and issuance of new rules following BP’s Deepwater Horizon accident further delayed plans to drill.

Only one well

The new permit application is for just one well in the Beaufort. Any Chukchi plans will wait until courtroom challenges are resolved, Shell Alaska Vice President Pete Slaiby said in a conference call Wednesday.

“We have every reason to believe the administration will permit 2011 exploration drilling in Alaska,” Slaiby said. “We should have approval by the fifth of November, but that could be extended.”

Shell also released details of an oil spill containment system to capture oil at the source in the event of a shallow-water blowout.

The system looks similar to the containment domes BP used with varied success in trying to capture some of the oil flowing from the blown- out Macondo well in the Gulf of Mexico this past summer.

Sea ice a complication

The shallower depths and lower pressures expected in the Arctic should make spill containment and response easier compared to the Gulf of Mexico. But the presence of sea ice for part of the year and the sites’ remote locations create other challenges.

Because the Arctic Ocean ices over for part of the year and sea ice sometimes pushes down into the seafloor, the blowout preventer and other wellhead equipment would be located in a 40-foot-deep hole — known as a mud line cellar – in the seafloor. This helps protect the equipment from ice but makes efforts such as placing a new capping system on a leaking well not feasible.

The presidential commission looking into BP’s oil spill said Wednesday that Shell’s Arctic spill response plan should be given closer scrutiny given the lessons learned from the Deepwater Horizon. In a paper on Arctic spill response, the commission credits Shell with exceeding current spill response requirements in its Alaska plans.

“But other drillers may not,” the paper says.

Coast Guard presence

The paper also says there should be an closer look at increasing Alaska’s Coast Guard resources to respond to a possible Arctic spills, since it’s only industry resources available for such problems.

“Because the Coast Guard has an admitted lack of response capacity in the Arctic, immediate responsibility would fall on industry and their oil spill response contractors,” the paper says. “Shell, at least, accepts this responsibility.”

Cindy Shogan, executive director of the Alaska Wilderness League, warned that the area Shell plans to drill in is frequented by endangered bowhead whales. She said the Department of Interior should require Shell to submit an entirely new exploration plan.