Oil and the Arctic: Pumping a convenient untruth

Gwynne Dyer, Straits Times 27 May 08;

WHAT links oil at US$135 (S$184) a barrel with last month's discovery of huge cracks in the Ward Hunt ice shelf off Ellesmere Island at the top of Canada's Arctic archipelago? And what might link those two things with a new, even Colder, War?

The cracks, more evidence that the ice cover on the Arctic Ocean is melting fast, were discovered by scientists tagging along with a Canadian army snowmobile expedition called a 'sovereignty patrol'.

The army was showing the flag because Canada, like the other Arctic countries, suspects that valuable natural resources will become accessible there once the ice melts. And the most valuable of those are oil and gas.

If we are heading for a mostly ice-free Arctic Ocean in the summer, then drilling for gas and oil can soon begin. Hardly a week goes by without somebody pointing to the US Geological Survey's report that the Arctic basin holds a quarter of the world's undiscovered oil and gas.

But the event that did most to trigger this new concern about sovereignty was Mr Artur Chilingarov's publicity stunt last summer.

A polar explorer of the old school (he was made a Hero of the Soviet Union in the old days for saving an ice-bound ship in Antarctica), Mr Chilingarov is now Deputy Speaker of the Russian Parliament and Mr Vladimir Putin's personal 'envoy' to the Arctic.

Last year, he took a three- man submarine to the bottom of the Arctic Ocean precisely at the North Pole, and planted a Russian flag in the seabed.

'The Arctic is Russian. We must prove the North Pole is an extension of the Russian landmass,' he said, and affected surprise at the fact that other countries with an Arctic coastline saw this as a challenge to their sovereignty.

Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper, for example, flew to the Arctic the very next week, and subsequently announced his country would build six to eight new 'ice-strengthened' warships for Arctic patrols.

The other three countries with Arctic coastlines, the United States (Alaska), Denmark (Greenland) and Norway, are equally suspicious of Russian intentions. The real issue is who owns the rights to the seabed, and the Russian claim is pretty ambitious.

Moscow claims that the Lomonosov Ridge, the subsea mountain range that goes straight across the middle of the Arctic Ocean, is an extension of the Russian territorial shelf, and so belongs to it. Alternatively, if the Law of the Sea tribunal does not accept that claim, Moscow may have a broader claim in reserve.

In the early 20th century, seven countries laid claim to parts of Antarctica on the basis of 'sectors': pie-shaped slices running along lines of longitude (which converge at the poles). The width of those slices depended on where the claimants owned territories near Antarctica, mostly islands in the Southern Ocean. Those claims are dormant because of a later treaty banning economic development in Antarctica, but the precedent has not been forgotten.

By that precedent, Russia could lay claim to about half of the Arctic Ocean on the basis of lines of longitude running from the far eastern and western ends of the country up to the North Pole - and in 1924 the old Soviet Union did precisely that. Nobody else accepted the claim then, and they wouldn't now if Russia raised it again. But Russia has the big Arctic ports and the nuclear-powered ice-breakers to make its claim stick, and nobody else does.

That is where the current panic comes from. It probably won't end up in a new Cold War, but it has certainly agitated all the hens in the coop.

But as is often the case with hens, they are over-reacting. Russia is in a more assertive mood than it was a decade ago, but there are no signs that it will pursue its claims by force. Also, there is no serious basis for the claim that a quarter of the world's undiscovered oil and gas reserves lie under the Arctic Ocean.

It seemed implausible, given that the Arctic Ocean accounts for only less than 3 per cent of the Earth's surface, but in fact the US Geological Survey never said anything of the sort. Neither has any other authoritative source, yet this factoid has gained such currency that it even influences government policy.

Isn't it interesting how readily people will believe something when they really want to?

The writer is a London-based independent journalist.