Resource Frontier - Alaska, Arctic, Antarctica, Deep sea drilling

Question 1

Resources found in the Arctic?

Answer 1

Some areas of the Arctic contains rich resources of oil, natural gas, minerals.

Question 2

Why havent they been exploited

Answer 2

• They are very hard to access, more than 80% of the Arctics gas and oil reserves are offshore.
• There is little infastructure in the Arctic which makes extraction and transportation difficult.
• The enviroment is challenging, sea ice can make transport difficult with extreme cold and winter storms can put equipment and workers at risk.
• There are concerns about how resource extraction will damage the fragile enviroment.

Question 3

Exploited resources in the Arctic

Answer 3

Some resources in parts of the Arctic are being explouted, for example large oil reserves were discovered in northern Alaska in 1968. In the 1970s the Trans-Alaska pipeline was constructed in order to carry oil to southern Alaska.

Question 4

Where has exploitation stopped in Alaska

Answer 4

In some frontier areas exploitation has stopped for now, for example in 2015 oil and gas company shell stopped drilling in the Chukchi sea in alaska because the cost of extracting oil was too high and reserves were smaller than expected, so exploitation wasnt economically viable.