– I suppose this is a case of good news / bad news.
– The good news is there is oil to be pumped and used and the world sorely needs more oil.
– The bad news is that we can now get at this oil because of global warming.
– The bad news is that it isn’t clear who ‘owns’ this oil as I wrote about here in September of 2007 and this may lead to political and military confrontations.
– The bad news is that finding more oil means that we can continue to dodge the energy bullet and continue to burn oil and put more CO2 into the atmosphere.
– Perspective is always good. Here’s some:
– As of 2005, we were using 30 billion barrels of oil per year. At that rate, these new arctic supplies will last three years.
– Is this discovery significant? Yes, as of 2005, only about 4 billion barrels of new oil per year were being discovered.
– This information is from here: ➡
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The Arctic holds as much as 90bn barrels of undiscovered oil and has as much undiscovered gas as all the reserves known to exist in Russia, US government scientists have said in the first governmental assessment of the region’s resources.
The report is likely to add impetus to the race among polar nations, such as Russia, the US, Denmark, Norway and Canada, for control of the region.
The US Geological Survey believes the Arctic holds 13 per cent of the world’s undiscovered oil, while 1,669,000bn cubic feet of natural gas is equivalent to 30 per cent of the world’s undiscovered gas reserves.
“The extensive Arctic continental shelves may constitute the geographically largest unexplored prospective area for petroleum remaining on earth,” the USGS said.
Last August Russia planted its flag on the seabed 4km under the North Pole raising fears of a rush to grab the Arctic’s mineral resources, particularly its oil and gas deposits. Denmark in May called a summit of the five Arctic powers in Ilulissat, Greenland, to try to restrain competition and reiterate the countries’ joint commitment to the United Nation’s Law of the Sea Convention that governs territorial waters.
Commercial interest in exploiting the Arctic has also increased, with Royal Dutch Shell, the Anglo-Dutch energy group, pushing to help Russia develop gas from the Yamal region, and Total winning the right to do so at Russia’s giant Shtokman gas field.
In the US, companies are pushing ever further into the Arctic regions of Alaska, while Denmark has attracted a number of large companies interested in exploring for oil and gas off the coast of Greenland.
More… ➡