Current situation of oil and gas exploration and development in Arctic region

A 2008 survey by the United States Geological Survey (USGS) estimated that 22 percent of the world's undiscovered technically recoverable oil and gas resources, including 13 percent of the world's undiscovered oil, 30 percent of undiscovered natural gas, and 20 percent of undiscovered natural gas liquids, are in the Arctic region. That means the Arctic holds about 90 billion barrels of technically recoverable oil, 47 trillion cubic meters of technically recoverable natural gas and 44 billion barrels of technically recoverable natural gas liquids. In recent years, with the shrinking of the Arctic ice cap and the tight supply of global oil and gas resources, the exploration and development of Arctic oil and gas have attracted more and more attention.

Overview of exploration and development

The exploration and exploitation of oil and gas resources in the Arctic has been going on for more than 100 years. In 1900, Wells were first drilled in Alaska and oil was found, but not enough to support industrial production. In 1956, Shell conducted seismic surveys in Wide Bays off the south coast of Alaska. Since then, the Arctic coastal countries of the United States, Canada, Russia, Norway and Greenland have carried out a series of exploration activities in the Arctic region. In 1968, the Atlantic Rich Field Company (ARCO) and Standard Oil Company drilled a well on the northern slopes of Alaska and discovered Prudhoe Bay, the largest oil field in North America. Subsequently, Shell and BP discovered the Liberty oil field in the Beaufort Sea. In 1988, at the end of the Soviet era, the Shtokman gas field was discovered in the Barents Sea in Russia, which has 3.8 trillion cubic meters of resources. In the Canadian Arctic, oil and gas were discovered on land as early as the 18th century. Imperial Oil began early exploratory drilling in the 1920s and discovered the Norman Wells field in the Northwest Territories; The Hibernia field off the coast of Newfoundland, which came on stream in 1997, is Canada's largest offshore oil project. Norway's development has focused on the offshore Arctic continental shelf, and the country's first Arctic oil field, Goliat, was discovered in 2000 and operated by ENI. Exploration for oil and gas offshore Greenland dates back to the 1970s, and the USGS Arctic Resources Survey in 2008 showed a total of 52 billion barrels of oil equivalent in potential oil and gas resources in three major basins around the island. Although there is great potential for exploitation, drilling has not been successful due to the harsh natural environment. However, many international oil companies involved in Greenland's development have expressed their expectations for future exploration prospects.

China also started exploration activities in the Arctic region in October 2016. Cnooc's most advanced 12-cable geophysical exploration ship "Haiyang Petroleum 720" successfully completed exploration operations in two blocks in the Arctic Barents Sea in 100 days, filling the gap in China's three-dimensional seismic exploration in the Arctic waters.

Technical challenge

As in other areas, seismic exploration is an indispensable technical means for oil and gas development in the Arctic. The extreme weather conditions and the extreme sensitivity of the natural environment have brought great obstacles to the acquisition of seismic data. Terrestrial seismic exploration is generally affected by surface roughness and near-surface variability, and this problem is more acute in the Arctic, so it can be very difficult to conduct exploration in the Arctic using conventional techniques. In the Arctic, the erosion and deposition of glaciers lead to complex geomorphologic features, including moraines, lakes, and ridges, and the lithology changes very quickly. Thawing regions may cause low-velocity distortion of body waves, while ice caps may cause bending of seismic waves. On the ground with permafrost and seasonal frozen layers, there are often sudden changes between the frozen layer and the melted layer, which often leads to sudden changes in the elastic properties of the rock layers in the horizontal and vertical directions, which increases the difficulty of seismic data processing. In order to improve the quality of Arctic seismic data acquisition, Schlumberger, Chico and other companies actively test the single detection acquisition, near offset encryption sampling and other technologies; The Israel Geological Survey has also developed seismic wave collecting instruments that use wind and solar energy to drift autonomously to explore the sea covered by thick ice.

In addition, in order to improve the efficiency of exploration in the Arctic region, Norwegian scientists have developed an instrument that can collect data on the ice, dragged by a special engine that is suitable for sliding on the snow and ice, greatly speeding up the exploration speed, and can complete the data collection within the length of 25 meters at a time, and the collection speed is 2.5~3 kilometers/hour. The speed of data acquisition with traditional instruments is only 3~4 km/day.