Piskarev A., Shkatov M. (Eds.) Energy potential of the Russian Arctic Seas

Elsevier, 2012. — 428 p.
Starting with the last decade of the twentieth century, the resource base of the main hydrocarbon material supplier countries has been increasing, chiefly due to offshore fields. In discovering and developing offshore fields in the Persian Gulf and the Gulf of Mexico, West Africa, Brazil, and other sea basins, exploration geologists all over the world are increasingly convinced that a major share of the so far undiscovered large fields is confined to the subsurface of the Arctic seas of Russia.
Russia has an extensive continental shelf (20% of the World Ocean shelf area), but it is only starting to develop an offshore oil-and-gas-producing industry. In Russia at present, oil and gas are produced at six fields in the Baltic, Caspian seas, and Sea of Okhotsk (the Sakhalin shelf). Several fields in the southern Barents and Kara seas have been prepared for development, and a large stock of revealed structures has also been formed in the northern parts of these seas. However, due to the low density of seismic lines, many of the revealed prospective areas in this region are outlined provisionally and require further investigation. In 2010, reflection CDP seismic surveying, financed from the federal budget, was started in the East Siberian Sea. The work aims at investigating the geological structure and the assessment of oil-and-gas presence in sedimentary basins of this most poorly explored area on the continental shelf of the Russian Federation (RF).
Russia is the largest supplier of energy resources to foreign countries. In connection with the RF Government resolution on constructing the East Siberia–Pacific trunk pipeline and the necessity of filling it, large-scale exploration work started in East Siberia. The assessments of the resource potential of this region are high; however, taking into account its specific features, the complex structure of the fields as well as an almost complete lack of production infrastructure, a quick attainment of high production volumes is unlikely. Under these circumstances, in our view, the development of the hydrocarbon raw material resources on the shelves should be prioritized. Regional geophysical studies of the Russian shelf seas of the Arctic Ocean were completed toward the mid-1980s. At the same time, the geological and geophysical uniqueness of the Arctic Ocean became clear. Nowhere else on Earth one can find such a diversity of structures of different age and type, among them active suture structures concentrated on such a small area. The deepwater part of the Arctic Ocean covers an area slightly exceeding four million km2, which is less than the area of the Philippine Sea. Possibly, the main reason of such uniqueness is due to the fact that the evolution of the currently existing structures of the Arctic Ocean since the Jurassic occurred near the Pole of the Earth’s rotation; that is, the direct impact of rotational forces causing ordering in the tectonic movements was minimal here.