NoaIzumiAn Arctic Cornocupia? Well…
June 9th 2009 21:00
Seeing Chukchi
The folks at Investor’s Business Daily are excited about the amount of oil and natural gas under the Chukchi Sea, and for good reason. Not only are those large quantities, the figures are the median numbers. Unlike IBD’s usual MO of reporting the high estimates, these are the amounts which researchers are greater than 50% sure of. With that amount of natural gas (actually 1550 trillion cubic feet; “1.6 trillion” is a misprint), even if we had to go halfsies with the Russians, we could stop importing the stuff and expand our use of it, maybe even enough to totally replace coal, which would seriously cut greenhouse gas emissions. But, there’s a slight problem with IBD’s analysis. See if you can spot it.
Mongabay: Oil and gas bonanza discovered in the Arctic
It took me a couple of readings to spot the discrepancy: the study looks at everything north of the Arctic Circle, not just the Chukchi Sea. So, not only would we have to share this bounty with Russia, Norway, Denmark, and Canada, most of it is under permanent sea ice and completely inaccessible, at least for the next thirty years.
Looking at the maps provided in the mongabay site, the Chukchi Sea does seem to have fairly sizable deposits of oil and natural gas, but how much? For that, we need to go back about a year.
Ancharage Daily News
So, instead of 83 billion barrels of oil, there are really more like 15. Instead of 1500 trillion cubic feet (30% of world reserves), it’s 77 trillion (30% of US reserves). That’s still a fair amount, but the real question is not how much is there, but how fast can we pump it out of the ground?
As far as I’ve been able to find out, there aren’t any reliable estimates of that, but as a comparison, the off-shore areas of the lower 48 states that are currently closed to drilling are estimated to have 18 billion barrels of oil and 85 trillion cubic feet of natural gas.
Energy Bulletin
And as I’ve pointed out here before, expected production isn’t much more than a trickle.
Crude Reasoning
In addition, drilling and extraction are likely to be more difficult, given the extreme northern location. Thanks to global warming, the Chukchi Sea is more accessible than it used to be, but it’s still covered by ice for a good part of the year. For the same reason, any oil spill would that much harder to clean up, maybe even impossible.
Audubon Alaska
So if an area with greater reserves and easier production will only yield a relatively small amount, why would we get excited about this? Adopting the proposed CAFÉ standards alone (which IBD opposes) would save as much oil (around 280,000 barrels/day) as is likely to come from drilling in currently prohibited off-shore areas and the Chukchi Sea combined.
And, from eye-balling the map again, it looks like most of the deposits are within United States territorial waters.
Wikipedia: Russia-United States maritime boundary
So, why all this worry about the Russians? Even if they had the desire to extract the oil and gas, they couldn’t. The stuff’s ours, whether we choose to pump it or not.
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