Russia: Digging deep for oil

Environmental campaigners have already begun speaking out against the deal signed on Friday between the Russian energy firm, Rosneft, and British Petroleum to exploit oil and gas deposits in Russia’s arctic shelf.

“BP has done little to address the issues raised by the Deepwater Horizon disaster,” said Greenpeace spokesperson Charlie Kronick, adding that the Greenland government refused to grant drilling concessions to the company because it wasn’t convinced that BP had rigorous enough safety protocols.

The British energy company was branded the world’s “environmental villain number one” by Friends of the Earth yesterday in response to its move to exploit oil reserves in a remote area with an unspoilt but delicate ecosystem and treacherous weather conditions. 

The partnership between Rosneft and BP will explore three areas covering 125 thousand km of the Arctic Shelf known as the Kara Sea. It is thought that up to 60 billion barrels of oil could be found there, enough to meet global demands fully for four years.

Greenpeace are not the only ones to be worried. Former Environment Minister for Britain, Ed Miliband, also expressed his concern, saying that he was “pretty worried” about the project. “I think that the lesson of the Deepwater Horizon, the gulf oil spill, should be that the task for all of us – private companies, government and so on – is not to just keep digging deeper and deeper for oil,” he said. “It is actually to find those alternative forms of energy that can help us to move forward in a clean way.”

But the Kara Sea is, according to BP’s chief executive, “one of the world’s last remaining unexplored basins” and will earn both Russia and BP a lot of money. The deal itself was valued at 7.8 billion dollars by BP and Roseneft, which is 75 per cent owned by the Kremlin, is now the largest BP shareholder with a 5 per cent stake in the energy firm. In return, the Russian Prime Minister has promised lucrative tax breaks.

The Greenpeace spokesman, however, warned that: “The Arctic is the world’s most fragile environment for oil exploration, while its ice sheet is melting rapidly due to climate change. Any company that drills for oil there forfeits any claim to environmental responsibility”. This is the first time that Russia’s Arctic will be opened to foreign oil companies.