The Seabed in the High North – How to Address Conflicts?

Abstract

A general question underlying current competing state interests in the Arctic is whether claims to the Arctic continental shelf are justified by existence of potential resources. Indeed, the assumption that a significant proportion of the world’s undiscovered oil and gas deposits lie beneath the Arctic seabed have turned the Arctic into a region of considerable geopolitical interest. However, geological investigations cover just small Arctic seabed areas; all other estimations are based on mathematic and methods of probabilistic modelling. For the purpose of this chapter, we present estimations made by U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) which were based on a geological probabilistic methodology. The USGS estimated the deposits of undiscovered oil and gas in 33 geologic provinces that thought to be prospective for petroleum. The sum of the estimates for each province indicates that 90 billion barrels of oil, 1,669 trillion cubic feet of natural gas, and 44 billion barrels of natural gas liquids may remain to be found in the Arctic, of which approximately 84 % is expected to be found in offshore areas.1 Another popular speculation regarding the Arctic is that, because of the changing climate of the Arctic, ice cover will reduce in the near future and most spaces of the Higher North will be available for normal navigation, which will dramatically influence the global shipping.2 Meanwhile, the USGS study, like other ones, is limited in its knowledge basis and method, also because of the geographical limitation of the seabed areas which were studied and their depth.3 That is why, in our view, present