Arctic oil rush should avoid precipitating ecological ruin: Experts

Experts have urged countries to carefully evaluate and assess their oil and gas exploration options beneath the Arctic Ocean, so as not to upset the regions ecological balance in the long-term.

Washington, Aug.25 : Experts have urged countries to carefully evaluate and assess their oil and gas exploration options beneath the Arctic Ocean, so as not to upset the region's ecological balance in the long-term.

By one estimate, 400 billion barrels of oil might lie beneath the Arctic seabed.

Some experts have warned that dangerous ice, extreme cold, and the risk of environmental catastrophe will pose serious barriers.

According to a National Geographic report, ice-related problems begin at the exploration stage.

Typical seabed oil exploration involves towing an array of giant air guns behind a research vessel. The guns make a loud noise that penetrates the ocean floor, allowing seismologists to measure the way sound travels and thus map underlying rock structures, including rocks that might trap pockets of fossil fuels.

Such exploration projects can be done efficiently in the Arctic today only in areas that are ice-free in the summer.

But often the icebreaker's wake is full of floating ice chunks that can impact the air guns.

If exploration attempts do find the predicted oil, drilling beneath the ice poses another hurdle.

It's not possible to build a drilling rig on top of the ice, because the ice moves. But for the same reason, a stationary platform would have to withstand enormous pressures from drifting pack ice.

According to Carl Pope, executive director of the Sierra Club, the Arctic is "a very fragile eco-system, and we haven't demonstrated a great capacity to operate there without doing a lot of damage."

Lubricants, metals, and other materials are likely to break down repeatedly in such extreme cold, he said, producing very "dirty" operations.

Joel Darmstadter, an economist at the non-partisan think tank Resources for the Future in Washington, adds that an oil spill in the remote Arctic might be considerably more difficult to clean up than the 1989 Exxon Valdez mishap in Alaska's Prince William Sound.

As recently as 1990 it was thought that ice cover kept the Arctic Ocean static and predictable, but now scientists realize that it's much more dynamic, which means that problems in one part of the Arctic may have unexpected consequences in another.

They think the solution may lie in looking at what was done two generations ago in Antarctica.

"Let's ask ourselves how much oil and gas is likely to be found, and what difference it will make in the energy situation," Darmstadter said.

Pope, of the Sierra Club, hopes that people will eventually steer toward Darmstadter's "relatively little" need for Arctic oil.

"If you say that what you really need is not oil but ways to drive to work," Pope said, "I'm pretty sure we can find ways to get to work that will be cheaper than using Arctic oil."

ANI