Assessing Arctic Futures

In the 21st century, the Arctic is increasingly viewed as an energy frontier, with some estimates reckoning that as much as a quarter of the world's undiscovered oil and natural gas could be found there. This new energy frontier spans the entire circumference of the globe, from controversial drilling in the Chukchi and Beaufort Seas north of Alaska, to the Canadian islands and Greenland, Norway's 'northern adventure' in the Beaufort Sea, and exploration in northern Russia. Global warming confronts energy companies some with opportunity and risks: increased access round the year for shipping, but the danger of unpredictable ice movements and melting undermining infrastructure.

The Arctic frontier is old. Europeans have been searching for a north-west and a north-east passage from the sixteenth century, circumventing the geopolitics of the continental masses and reducing energy dependencies on the winds, or the heavy consumption of coal and diesel oil. Equally, energy resources have long been directly exploited from the Arctic: for centuries, oil for lighting from whales, and in the twentieth century, coal from Svalbard, oil from Norman Wells in Canada, and since 1970, the great Alaskan oilfields of Prudhoe Bay as well as natural gas in northern Russia.

The project Assessing Arctic Futures asks: how do present events and predictions look viewed against this long history of development, dreaming, and at times, disaster? How does the present fit in a longer narrative of 'adventures', stock bubbles, and energy 'boosterism'?

Much has been written about Arctic geopolitics and rivalries between the powers of the north over land and sea; much has been written about the impact of development on indigenous peoples and the environment. We know less about why the Arctic emerged as an energy frontier at particular times and places, and the coalitions of action and argument that needed to come together to make that happen. Often general world prices or market conditions are invoked as reasons for wanting to exploit the circumpolar lands. But how and why were such views propounded within companies and government; sold to investors, spun in the media, how was the prospect of profits linked to personal, corporate and national missions? Why the Arctic and not, or alongside, other parts of the globe? What predictions were made and how did they turn out? What forms of knowledge and visualisation did they rely on? This project seeks to place the history of Arctic energy in a wider world context, and look in more detail at how the Arctic was connected discursively, to the national and international markets for energy: a history of the interaction of financiers, geologists, prospectors, engineers, scientists, entrepreneurs, explorers, miners, oilmen, indigenous inhabitants, and all their families...

For more information contact Paul Warde.

The Assessing Arctic Futures program is based at the Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm, with the support of MISTRA, the Swedish research Council for Sustainability.