Webizen’s new online FPS (First Person Shooter) game, called Arctic Combat, is based on war over Arctic resources. According to the game’s prospectus:
“The conflict between the US and Russia rises more and more as past disputes are once again reminded. Battles have started in the Arctic region and is spreading across the world. World War III has begun.“
The game launches on December 6, 2012 & is said to be free.
View Trailer:
Shares in Tullow Oil (LON:TLW) gained 14 percent and closed at £14.18 on Monday after the FTSE 100 group announced it is going to join the race for oil riches in the Arctic.
Maersk and Tullow Partnership
On 15 October The Telegraph reported that Tullow Oil has taken a 40 percent equity position in Block 9 – a giant 11,802 sq km license in Baffin Bay, to the northwest of Greenland. Naalakkersuisut, Greenland’s government, has approved the agreement between Maersk Oil (CPH:MAERSK-A) and Tullow in which the Danish company will continue to act as operator of the license with its 47.5 percent interest, while Greenland’s Nunaoil will hold 12.5 percent.
Maersk Oil has already conducted a seismic survey of some 1,850 sq km and will decide on whether to drill in the area by 2014 after analysing the 3D seismic data. Both companies assured no drilling will take place until it has been established there is no risk to the fragile Arctic Environment. “We are very pleased to be partnering with Maersk Oil and Nunaoil in this unexplored and highly prospective province. Our complementary skills and expertise will allow us to evaluate fully the potential of it in the initial seismic phase,” said Tullow’s exploration director Angus McCoss.
British-Based Oil Company Develops African Licenses While Planning Arctic Venture Tullow shares the ambitions of oil giants such as Shell, ExxonMobil and Chevron to tap into the suspected 90 billion reserves of crude oil in the Arctic – almost three times the annual global consumption.
Mauritania Natural Gas Project
According to Tim O’Hanlon, vice president of Tullow’s African business, the UK-based explorer will start working on a natural gas project in Mauritania as soon as talks with potential buyers are finished. Construction of pipelines for the Banda gas field and other necessary facilities are scheduled to begin by the end of next year and gas production is planned for late 2014 or early 2015 said Mr O’Hanlon as reported by Bloomberg.
Banda reserves are estimated to be around 500 billion cubic feet and some of the natural gas production is meant for a future Mauritanian power-plant.
Tullow to Begin Third Well in Kenya
The British explorer and its Canadian partner Africa Oil Corp (CVE:AOI) have started drilling a third well in Kenya in an attempt to discover further reserves in the east African country. The well is known as Paipai-1 and has a planned total depth of 4,112 meters with predicted reserves of 121 million barrels of oil. The companies hope to find crude oil as opposed to more natural gas.
Paipai-1 is an onshore drilling site in Block 10A – Tullow acts as operator with 50 percent share followed by Africa Oil with 30 percent and London-listed Afren with the remaining 20 percent.
Tullow Oil is also awaiting results from another oil drill in Twiga-1, which are expected by the end of the month.
If there is an oil discovery, the companies will most probably spur heavy investment in Kenyan infrastructure projects such as refineries and pipelines.
Kenya’s energy minister Kiraitu Murungi believes his country has enough oil to accommodate the needs of the oil ventures. “We are becoming the new Middle East,” said Mr Murungi at a conference earlier this year.
The European parliament’s industry committee has rejected attempts to introduce a moratorium on offshore oil and gas drilling in the Arctic, overruling a contrary vote by its environment committee last month.
The key vote in the industry committee yesterday (9 October) instead proposed a new directive to ensure that companies have “adequate financial security” to cover the liabilities that could be incurred by any accidents.
Drilling companies would also have to submit to national authorities a safety hazard and emergency response report at least 24 weeks before the planned start of operations.
A plenary vote in December will now consider one surviving amendment from the environment committee vote, which would impel member states to refrain from licencing drills unless an effective accident response can be guaranteed.
The European Commission had initially proposed a binding EU-wide regulation, but the industry committee’s vote instead plumped for a directive, which member states can choose how to enforce according to their regional standards.
“Questions have been raised about the significant revocation and amendments of existing equivalent national legislation and guidance [a regulation] might entail,” said the parliamentary rapporteur, Ivo Belet (European People’s Party).
“Such redrafting would divert scarce resources from the safety assessments and inspections on the field,” he added.
British oil industry representatives used similar arguments, according to minutes of a stakeholder peer review meeting at the European Commission’s Joint Research Centre.
“Implementing the Regulation would tie-up considerable resources in both industry and regulators … taking them away from the ‘front line’ where the hazards are,” representatives of Oil and Gas UK said.
After that meeting, the head of the European Commission’s coal and oil unit, Jan Panek, invited the Oil and Gas UK representatives to a separate bilateral meeting on the legal instrument and requirements in the regulation, which took place in April 2012.
Tip of the iceberg
Environmentalists suspect that this was the tip of a lobby iceberg. “This vote had the fingerprints of oil lobby all over it,” Greenpeace spokesman Joris den Blanken told EurActiv.
Amid intense industry lobbying, EurActiv has learned that the oil giant Chevron offered MEPs on the committee a free trip to its offshore Alba platform on 12-14 July, involving two nights stay in an Aberdeen hotel, helicopter trips to the platform, and several briefings.
But a Chevron representative informed EurActiv that the trip had not in fact gone ahead, due to “organisational reasons” on which she declined to elaborate.
Ivo Belet’s office said that he had “had the intention” of going on the package, but instead visited a platform in the Netherlands on a paid-for trip to GDF Suez’s K12B gas-producing platform which utilises carbon capture and storage techniques.
In March 2011, another shadow rapporteur on the committee, Vicky Ford (European Conservatives and Reformists), who tabled more than half of the 642 amendments on the report, visited a rig off the coast of Aberdeen paid for by the oil company ConocoPhillips.
Such trips are considered necessary and educational for legislators, and may not be luxurious, but environmentalists are wary of undue influence when MEPs adopt positions close to the industry’s interests.
A spokesperson at Ford’s office said that she had registered her trip on her European Parliament online declaration of interests but it was not mentioned there at the time of writing.
Camel operations in the Sahara
Oil producing countries such as Norway also pushed hard for the proposed regulation to be transmuted into a directive, because of the “massive administrative burden” and “complicated legal questions” it could raise, according to a Norwegian position paper, seen by EurActiv.
Norway’s deputy oil and energy minister, Per Rune Henriksen, went further, arguing that for the EU to claim jurisdiction over the Arctic by banning drills there “would almost be like us commenting on a camel operations in the Sahara.”
The EU sees itself as an actor in the Arctic because three EU countries have territory in the Arctic – Denmark, Finland and Sweden – while Iceland is an EU candidate.
The EU has in return applied for an enhanced observer seat on the Arctic Council, partly because climate change is a transboundary issue, affecting European weather patterns and fish stocks alike.
Gustaf Lind, the Arctic Council’s current chair, told EurActiv that “of course, as we have EU members, we can all say that we’re positive, very positive [towards the EU's application] but we try to avoid reviewing specific applications in the media.”
Arctic resource race
The EU’s application comes as the continent’s ice has melted to its lowest level ever, carving the pristine region open for a resource race.
The US Geological Survey says that the region could be home to 13% of the world’s undiscovered oil reserves and 30% of its undiscovered gases, and gold and diamond mining companies also view its prospects with relish.
Arctic nations often bemoan a perceived southern hypocrisy that would prevent them from enjoying the same economic benefits from fossil fuel production that others have done.
Oil extracted from the Arctic emits no more greenhouse gas than that produced anywhere else but the region’s remote and hostile terrain could make rescue operations treacherous in the event of an accident.
Arctic futures
Gunnar Wiegand, a director at the EU’s External Affairs Action Service, told an Arctic Futures Symposium in Brussels on 4 October that he hoped EU legislation could inspire Arctic nations to firmer environmental legislation.
“The acquis [accumulated legislation] in the Arctic Council doesn’t go as far as any of the environmental legislation of the EU,” he said.
Maria Damanaki, the EU’s maritime commissioner, told the same conference that as the continent’s ice thawed, new opportunities could arise.
“Offshore drilling in the Arctic now becomes a viable option for big oil companies,” she said. “Arctic reserves could hold enough oil and gas to meet global demand for several years. This is a need the world economy has.”
“Though we may be greening the world economy, oil and gas remain vital for us and will do for some years,” she added.
Scientists are more concerned that the Arctic ice melt could raise sea levels, accelerate global warming by reducing the region’s ice reflectivity of solar heat, and change Gulf Stream currents.
If the Arctic’s summer ice melts completely, some scientists fear that methane hydrates currently frozen on the seabed could be released, causing a runaway and unstoppable greenhouse effect.
Europe rejects ban on Arctic oil drilling | Environment | guardian.co.uk.
ST. PETERSBURG – The scientist responsible for preparing Russia’s claim to seabed rights at the top of the world says Canada and his country are both poised to reap staggering economic benefits when a deal on who owns title to what in the northern ocean is finally struck.
“Canada has a wonderful shelf and basin, so of course Canada can get very rich from this,” said Victor Posyolov, deputy director of Russia’s Institute of World Ocean Geology and the head of its Arctic research program.
Poring over maps tracking the evidence that he is amassing for Russia’s claim, Posyolov estimated that his country, with the longest Arctic coastline, would gain rights to about 1.2 million square kilometres of seabed. He reckoned Canada would get about 800,000 square kilometres of sub-surface territory. That would be about twice as much seabed as the other claimants, Denmark and the United States, are likely to get.
“The biggest shelves and basins are in Canadian waters and it will benefit the most. The U.S. and Denmark have modest sectors,” Posyolov said in a room dominated by a circumpolar map that Canada and Russia jointly produced in 1992.
“We are not involved in studies of how much oil and gas may lie in the Danish, Canadian and U.S. sectors, but there is open data using different methods to make forecasts. Every country knows or imagines that there are reserves there.”
Much has been made of the potentially overlapping claims for the Arctic, but Posyolov foresees little possibility of conflict. There already is “an approximate plan for the division of the Arctic that is not in dispute,” the oceanologist said. It was based on the principle that exclusive economic zones extend out 200 nautical miles (332 kilometres) from each coastal state’s shoreline.
The grey area was beyond the 200-mile limit. To claim sub-surface rights beyond that point, a country has to prove that a geographic link exists between its land mass and adjacent underwater formations that may extend far out to sea. Much of the research pertains to a formation known as the Lomonosov Ridge, which snakes under the ocean for much of the distance between Russia, Canada and Greenland.
Based on standard geographic principles involving equidistance, Russia and Canada would likely agree to split the Lomonosov Ridge at or near its middle. Posyolov suggested it was far more likely that Canada and Denmark would have a difference of opinion over the ridge where it runs closest to Greenland and Canada’s Ellesmere Island.
Russia submitted a claim in 2001 to the UN Commission on the Limits of the Continental Shelf, which makes recommendations about who is entitled to what. The commission asked Moscow to provide additional data for the Lomonosov Ridge and the adjacent Mendeleev Rise.
While the Lomonosov and Mendeleev formations are central to Russia’s claim to much of the top of the world, Posyolov acknowledged that the UN “might declare the North Pole belongs to all humanity and that the area 60 miles around the North Pole belongs to no country.”
To prepare its claim, Russia has undertaken five separate polar expeditions since 2002, the last of which ends this month. Conducting such research has not been cheap. Each mission had involved two icebreakers and cost between $20 million and $30 million, Posyolov said. To share costs, the Danes had asked for Russia’s help with icebreakers while Canada has been working with the U.S., he said.
Tracing a red line that reached far out into the ocean on one of the maps on his desk, Posyolov said that was the rough extent of Russia’s claim. It was based on 13,000 kilometres of bathymetric studies of the underwater depths of the Arctic, 7,000 kilometres of seismic studies of the sea floor as well as research based on multi-beam echo soundings and studies that involved reflection and refraction waves.
Having already submitted a claim to the UN commission, Russia was at the front of the queue. Its revised claim is to be presented in 2013. Denmark and Canada will follow by the end of 2014. The U.S. position is unclear as Washington is not yet a signatory to the UN Convention on the Law of the Seas, whose membership elects the commission on the limits of the continental shelf.
“We present our materials and they say whether they are well-based, convincing and correspond to the UN convention,” Posyolov said. Each country could also say whether its claim was harmed by the claim of another country.
Headlines proclaiming a modern day Gold Rush to stake claims in the Far North badly missed the mark, Posyolov said. As an example of how long it can take to sort such issues out, he cited Norwegian and Russian claims that had taken three decades to resolve.
There are already 51 sea claims before the UN commission. As only about three of them are examined each year, Posyolov guessed that unless the process is somehow accelerated, it would be several decades before the pending Arctic claims were resolved.
© Copyright: Postmedia News
Read more: http://www.canada.com/Canada+Russia+will+share+Arctic+riches+scientist+predicts/7358861/story.html#ixzz28kZg9JQI
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