Norway sets Arctic oil plan – boom or gloom?

Norway set rules for oil and gas exploration in the Barents Sea on Friday amid major uncertainty about whether the pristine Norwegian Arctic will mean boom or gloom for oil firms.

The U.S. Geological Survey has suggested that 25 percent of the world’s undiscovered petroleum resources could be in the Arctic. But some experts say oil may have leaked from the Barents, off the northern tip of Europe, millions of years ago.

..”Tectonic activity makes the Barents a higher risk area than in the North Sea,” Kjell Oygard of Norway’s Sintef independent industrial research group told Reuters.

His study said humans may be millions of years too late to get rich from Barents oil. Still, he said there were some promising areas.

Norwegian companies have long pushed for greater access to the Barents Sea, hoping it will be a new frontier that will help them keep up output as fields run dry further south and finds become scarce.

Reuters