Pan Arctic Forum

By Matt Buxton, NewsMiner.com

FAIRBANKS — With the Carlson Center’s covered ice hockey rink beneath their feet, hundreds of people from Arctic nations gathered for a chilly three-day conference to discuss and learn about energy in the far north.

The event is the Arctic Energy Summit and is the third of its kind held since 2007 by the Alaska-based Institute of the North.

By Mia Bennett, The Maritime Executive

In Singapore, they say, there are two seasons: summer outdoors and winter indoors. On a hot and dangerously hazy night last week, the freezing-cold taxi cab from Changi Airport to my hotel proved that right.

I had arrived on this tropical island nation to participate in a roundtable on the Arctic. My cab cruised past a Formula One racetrack set up for the weekend under the haze-shrouded lights of corporate regional headquarters and five-star hotels. Singapore is an anomaly even within its own region, with its futuristic skyscrapers and shipyards sandwiched between the palm oil plantations and azure waters of Malaysia and Indonesia.

By  Rakteem Katakey Winnie Zhu, Bloomberg Business

Royal Dutch Shell Plc will halt exploration in the U.S. Arctic after $7 billion of spending ended with a well off Alaska that failed to find any meaningful quantities of oil or natural gas.

Shell said it expects to take financial charges related to the Alaskan operations, which carry a value of about $3 billion on its balance sheet with additional contractual commitments of about $1.1 billion. The Hague-based company will cease further offshore activity in the region for the foreseeable future. The shares fell as much as 1.4 percent.

by Alan Kovski (Bloomberg BNA)

The short drilling season for oil exploration in U.S. Arctic offshore waters will reach one stopping point Sept. 28 and a complete halt Oct. 31 for Royal Dutch Shell Plc. The company has been drilling since July 30 at the Burger prospect in the Chukchi Sea north of Alaska. If oil is discovered, it will require some very interesting and complicated development decisions and regulatory considerations.

BY ZOË SCHLANGER

Newsweek

You’d be forgiven for thinking a new cold war is underway in the Arctic. Judging by appearances—from presidential proclamations to front-page screamers—it seems we are deep into an arms race of naval exercises and icebreaker ships, and that any day now the winner will be announced. That country, the popular narrative suggests, will then become the oil-soaked Saudi Arabia of the frozen north, and the losers will hang their heads.

On 21 August the Polarled gas pipeline crossed 66 degrees and 33 minutes north of the equator becoming the first pipeline to take the Norwegian gas infrastructure across the Arctic Circle.

This will open a new gas highway from the Norwegian Sea to Europe, Statoil writes in a press release.

The 482-kilometre long and 36-inch wide pipeline will run from Nyhamna in western Norway to the Aasta Hansteen field in the Norwegian Sea. The world’s largest pipelaying vessel, Solitaire from Allseas, is carrying out the job and is advancing slowly, exactly 24.4 metres at a time, every sixth minute or so, around the clock.

By Shaun Ley

BBC World News

When, like Evon Peter, you know your ancestors have lived, hunted and fished the same land for 14,000 years, the concerns of nations which have existed only for a few hundred can seem trivial.

Yet in the Arctic, the proximity of Russia and the US is becoming hard to ignore.

For full article, click here.

By JAMES M. LOY

Hartford Courant

President Barack Obama should be applauded for gathering world leaders in Anchorage, Alaska, this week for a U.S.-led conference on “Global Leadership in the Arctic.” Yet the summit’s limited focus on climate change, though undoubtedly important, belies the significance of the broader U.S. interests and responsibilities in the Arctic.

As ice turns to navigable ocean, the Arctic is becoming the U.S.’s third great ocean border, creating vexing strategic challenges and unprecedented opportunities. These include not only climate change, but threats to national sovereignty and security, revolutions in international commerce and a Klondike-like rush to control vast undersea resources.