Resource Potential Beneath the Ice

In 2008 the United States Geological Survey published its Circum-Arctic Resource Appraisal (CARA), the first systematic, publicly available assessment of hydrocarbon potential across the entire region north of the Arctic Circle. The study estimated that the Arctic could hold about 13 percent of the world's undiscovered, technically recoverable conventional oil and roughly 30 percent of its undiscovered natural gas, on the order of 90 billion barrels of oil and 1,670 trillion cubic feet of gas, with the great majority of that gas concentrated in just a few basins off the coasts of Russia. The USGS was explicit that these figures describe resources believed to exist based on geological analogy and probability modeling, not proven, discovered reserves, and that most of the estimated resources lie offshore in water shallower than 500 meters, largely within the exclusive economic zones already claimed by the five Arctic coastal states.