For the first time, Russia has allowed oil tankers that lack reinforced hulls for dealing with ice to navigate its Arctic waters – a move that experts warn could raise the risk of environmentally-damaging oil spills in the sensitive Arctic ecosystem.
The news comes as part of an already-unprecedented surge in oil tankers travelling eastwards through the Northern Sea route, which runs along the Russian Arctic coastline to China’s ports in the Pacific Ocean. Taking advantage of climate change and reduced sea ice, Russia has increased the number of oil shipments to China in response to Western sanctions that cut off access to the European market amidst its ongoing invasion of Ukraine.
“While we only saw one test voyage in 2022, and before that only a handful of oil tankers via the Arctic in the entire decade prior, this summer we have seen in excess of 15 tankers, including large Suezmax vessels without ice classification,” says at High North News, an independent newspaper published by the High North Center at Nord University in Norway.
Advertisement
Such Arctic oil shipments to Asia must also pass through the Bering Strait between Russia and Alaska – a “marine mammal super-highway” that represents “one of the most important wildlife migratory chokepoints in the entire Arctic”, says at the Belfer Center, a think tank based in Harvard University.
This wildlife includes grey whales and belugas, Pacific walruses, ice seals and more than 10,000 bowhead whales which migrate each year between the north Pacific and Arctic waters, says Williams. Any oil spilled there could affect these species, as well as millions of seabirds that nest on the coastal cliffs and islands in the Bering Strait region. An oil spill would also impact local human populations.
“Of course, this region has been home to people for thousands of years,” says Williams. “And many communities on both sides of the strait – Siberian Yupik, Central Yupik, Iñupiaq and Chukchi – continue to depend on the abundance and health of the marine environment.”
Oil spill cleanups in the Arctic’s icy waters could be “nearly impossible, as the oil becomes viscous and will mix with sea ice”, says Humpert. And the impacts could be long-lasting – a study published this month that revisited the sites of oil spill experiments in the Canadian Arctic’s Baffin Island showed .
This year, over the Arctic summer, the US Coast Guard held a to test different aircraft in response to a simulated tanker oil spill originating on the Russian side of the Bering Strait. Although the US and Russia had previously discussed how to jointly respond to such an incident, cooperation has faltered since the full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine in March 2022.
More broadly, , according to a study published this month. The research showed that the amount of time ships spend operating in extreme winter conditions has tripled, largely because there are now more liquefied natural gas and oil projects in the region.
Russia’s developing Arctic LNG 2 and Vostok Oil projects could potentially double the volume of oil and gas flowing through the Northern Sea route within the next several years, says Humpert. He describes that trend – driven by the growing energy cooperation between Russia and China – as “bad news for the Arctic environment”.
