17 com­pa­nies sear­ching for oil in new area in the eas­tern Barents Sea

The exact posi­ti­on of the bor­der bet­ween Rus­sia and Nor­way in the Barents Sea has been deter­mi­ned in a trea­ty bet­ween the two count­ries as late as in 2010. Nor­way has recent­ly ope­ned a new area, as lar­ge as Switz­er­land, for explo­ra­ti­on. On Tues­day, no less than 17 inter­na­tio­nal com­pa­nies have announ­ced that they want to enga­ge in explo­ra­ti­on in the new area in 2014. The­se are BP, Che­vron, Cono­co­Phil­lips , Eni, Roy­al Dutch Shell, Lukoil, Ide­mit­su, Rep­sol, Det nor­ske, Win­ters­hall, Sun­cor, VNG, PGNiG , Spike, Sta­toil, GDF Suez and Lun­din Petro­le­um.

The U.S. Geo­lo­gi­cal Sur­vey esti­ma­tes the poten­ti­al near 90 mil­li­on bar­rel. Explo­ra­ti­on is sche­du­led to start in April 2014. The Nor­we­gi­an oil minis­try has alre­a­dy car­ri­ed out some first explo­ra­ti­on work.

It is safe to assu­me that envi­ron­men­tal aspects will not keep the Nor­we­gi­an aut­ho­ri­ties from giving out licen­ses for explo­ra­ti­on, which includes seis­mic sur­veys with explo­si­ves, and for explo­ita­ti­on. (side note: it is easier to clo­se some more are­as for tou­rists and then pre­tend you have done some­thing for the envi­ron­ment the­re).

Source: Finan­cial Post

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