Sakhalin weighs environmental cost of Shell project

Residents of Sakhalin, historically one of Russia’s poorest regions, had great hopes for Shell’s giant oil and gas project, the biggest undertaken by the Anglo-Dutch oil major.

However, some people on the island north of Japan now fear the environmental costs of the $20 billion project may leave them worse off than before.

The consortium’s fields contain 4.5 billion barrels of reserves but extracting them is complicated because they lie under the feeding grounds of the critically endangered Western Gray Whale, and the sea in the north is frozen for six months.

Reuters