Arctic Resource Competition Among Nations

The scale of Arctic resource competition rests substantially on a single influential estimate. The U.S. Geological Survey's Circum-Arctic Resource Appraisal, published in 2008, estimated that the area north of the Arctic Circle holds approximately 13 percent of the world's undiscovered conventional oil and about 30 percent of its undiscovered conventional natural gas, along with significant natural gas liquids, with the great majority of these resources believed to lie offshore under less than 500 meters of water. The assessment, while widely cited by governments and media as evidence of an impending Arctic "resource race," was itself a probabilistic geological estimate of undiscovered resources rather than proven reserves, and its numbers have sometimes been invoked in political and media discourse with more certainty than the underlying science supports.