Taking Stock of North Pole Riches

Oil and natural gas are luring the major powers to the Arctic. The new Great Game includes Russia, the US, Canada and other countries competing for natural resources around the North Pole. More information is available today than ever before about the location and abundance of the region’s riches.

For years it remained economically unviable to extract oil and natural gas in the Arctic, but the situation is now changing: Interim price drops notwithstanding, prices on commodity exchanges will rise again in the near future.

“We must not let us ourselves be swayed by low oil prices,” says Fatih Birol, chief economist of the International Energy Agency in Paris. “Raw materials extraction problems are not out of this world — to the contrary. Our figures leaves no doubt about that.”

Economists are convinced that global demand for oil will continue to grow, and that growth will have three epicenters — China, India and the Middle East. In November 2008, in the midst of the global economic crisis, experts from the German Federal Institute for Geosciences and Natural Resources (BGR) warned of an imminent oil shortage.

“Oil will be the first energy commodity where a real shortage will be felt due to the finiteness of the resource,” BGR President Hans-Joachim K