Commercial Potential

With ice melting rapidly, interest in the Arctic has heated up. Indeed, in 2007 Artur Chilingarov, a member of Russia's lower house of parliament, employed a deep-sea submersible to stake a titanium Russian flag 14,000 feet below the ice in a gesture reminiscent of a bygone colonial era. Meanwhile, the mining industry continues to lay stakes on caribou grounds and companies such as ConocoPhillips and BP Exploration Ltd. have already spent hundreds of millions on hydrocarbon leases in the region. The 2008 US Geological Survey estimates that 22% of the world's undiscovered, technically recoverable resources are located in the Arctic, with 84% of these resources located offshore. Even conservative estimates place the amount of methane hydrates in the region at one or more magnitudes larger than the conventional reserves cited by the US Geological Survey. With increasing global demand for natural resources, the competition for control of Arctic reserves is accelerating.