14 DAY TRIAL // Several green groups are now bending over backwards trying to keep oil and gas companies from drilling in the Arctic. According to state-owned Norwegian oil company Statoil, these greenheads might have jumped the gun, and started protesting Arctic drilling long before that practice was even possible.
The oil and gas company maintains that, due to the Arctic's notorious inhospitality, it will be several decades until large-scale drilling and exploration in this part of the world even become feasible.
“We don't envisage production from several of these areas before 2030 at the earliest; more likely 2040, probably not until 2050,” said Statoil's Exploration Chief, Tim Dodson, as cited by Oil Price.
Hence, environmentalists might want to save their strength until they actually have something worth protesting against.
According to Tim Dodson, what oil companies interested in drilling in the Arctic must first and foremost worry about is the fact that, because of the very harsh local environmental conditions, drilling in the Arctic can turn out to be way more costly than drilling in any other regions of the world.
“There’s almost no prospectivity on this planet that can support drilling exploration levels for half a billion dollars each. And that's what we're talking about, half a billion dollars for some of these wells,” Tim Dodson pointed out.
The Arctic is estimated to hold about 90 billion barrels of oil reserves. This means that, harsh environmental conditions and high costs aside, companies will not give up on the idea of exploiting it all that easily. Even if they have to wait several decades to be able to do so.