Commodity Online
WASHINGTON: In a significant revelation Wednesday the US Geological Survey said the icy land mass of Arctic holds 90 billion barrels of crude and vast gas reserves.
In a report released by the US government run USGS here said, the region is shaping up as the future centre of a fight to control oil as most of it was lie there in offshore.
Apart from the oil reserves, the top of the world, which is shared by half a dozen countries including the US, Russia, Canada, Sweden, Norway and Greenland, holds an estimated 1670 trillion cubic feet of gas and 44 million barrels of natural gas liquids, the USGS said.
The report said 84 per cent of those potential energy resources are expected to lie offshore. The report comes one week after the US Government lifted a 17-year ban on offshore drilling as it worked to ease a spiraling fuel-price crisis.
“The resources account for about 22 per cent of the undiscovered, technically recoverable resources in the world,” the USGS said, meaning that the estimated volume is not added to the world’s known recoverable resources.
Broken down, the Arctic energy reserves would account for about 13 per cent of undiscovered oil, 30 per cent of undiscovered natural gas and 20 per cent of undiscovered natural gas liquids in the world.
USGS experts estimate that Alaska holds the biggest single share of the undiscovered 90 billion barrels of crude oil, at 30 per cent.
Alaska, Russia’s Barents Basins, East and West Greenland and East Canada together own the majority of the entire oil reserves.
Some 40 billion barrels of oil and 1100 trillion cubic feet of gas have already been found in the Arctic region. By comparison, US oil reserves stand at 22 billion barrels, and its production level is at 1.6 billion barrels a year.
Around the world, proven oil reserves stand at a record 1.24 trillion barrels. Production is stable, but consumption - 30 billion barrels a day - is on the rise.
The 1670 trillion cubic feet of natural gas that the Arctic region is estimated to hold is potentially a more important find, since it would represent nearly one-third of all the undiscovered gas reserves in the world.
Most of the untapped gas reserves in the Arctic region (70 per cent) lie in the West Siberian Basin and East Barents Basin of Russia and Arctic Alaska, the USGS said.
