The Arctic Great Game Begins

[hatrack]

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Work on Snow White, the liquefied natural gas processing plant on the edge of Hammerfest, began in 2002. Since then, gas pipes have been laid running 140km (87 miles) out to the Snow White gas field, 30,000 lorryloads of concrete have been poured into a looming grey edifice, two million metres of cables have been laid, and nearly three million cubic metres of rock blasted to form a breakwater against the freezing ocean.

Today the Snow White terminal rises, floodlit in the afternoon winter darkness, like some ghostly set of a James Bond film, a man-made compound in which workers scurry about, surrounded by ice cliffs and barbed wire. Next year the gas will start to flow, and so will the money. “We estimate the Snow White project will earn 400 billion Kroner (£34 billion), and the reservoir is expected to last at least 30 years,” Sverre said.

But if the scientists are right, the burning of this fossil fuel will add to greenhouse gases, the world will warm more, the ice will become thinner and smaller, and the prospectors will be able to push ever farther north in search of energy. Norwegian environmentalists have bitterly opposed the oil-and-gas exploration, saying that the drilling in the Barents Sea puts at risk a vital and fragile ecosystem. Protests caused the Norwegian Government to halt oil exploration in 2001, but the ban has been lifted in most areas. Put simply, the receding ice makes it far easier to find, drill and extract oil and gas. The Arctic Ocean is thought to contain at least a quarter of the world’s undiscovered reserves.

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But the biggest prize so far is the Shtokman field in Russia, the largest offshore gas reservoir in the world, with a reservoir ten times the size of Snow White. Lying 560km into the Arctic Ocean presents piping difficulties but, as Sverre said: “With warming there will be more open sea, and it will be easier to get to.” While scientists dispute the causes of global warming, few deny that the Arctic is thawing, and fast. In August last year a Russian vessel, the Akademik Fyodorov, became the first to reach the North Pole without an icebreaker. With temperatures expected to rise a further 5.5C in the next 100 years, the frozen white mantle that has crowned the world for millennia may soon vanish, replaced by a seasonal sea.

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http://www.ecoearth.info/articles/reader.asp?linkid=52251

[Dead_Parrot]

1. Epitaph for humanity:

"With warming there will be more open sea, and the gas will be easier to get to."
Ack...