By Colin Perkel, The Canadian Press  | May 09, 2012

Martin Louie a First Nations leader from Nadieh, B.C arrives at the Enbridge AGM after leading a march of first nation protesters and their supporters through downtown Toronto as they continue their protest against proposed oil pipelines in Canada’s west coast, on Wednesday May 9, 2012. THE CANADIAN PRESS/Chris Young

* Joint venture to operate in Barents and Okhotsk Seas

* Follows similar Rosneft deals with Exxon and Eni

* Strengthens Putin’s energy development legacy as PM

* Statoil and Rosneft to partner up for Norwegian licences

By Melissa Akin and Vladimir Soldatkin

MOSCOW, May 5 (Reuters) – Norway’s Statoil will drill in Russian Arctic waters thought to contain 2 billion tonnes of oil in partnership with Rosneft, marking the third deal of its kind for the Russian state company.

The agreement, signed on Saturday, provided a showcase for president-elect Vladimir Putin, serving out his final days as prime minister before a May 7 inauguration, and Deputy Prime Minister Igor Sechin, in charge of energy and industrial policy.

As a legacy of their time in government, the three deals secure capital and expertise for a push into some of the world’s potentially most energy-rich regions.

Rosneft President Eduard Khudainatov said Statoil in turn invited his firm to partner up and bid in Norway’s coming licensing rounds.

That offers an entry ticket to one of the world’s most developed offshore oil and gas sectors, aiding the government’s goal of building its top companies into respected global players.

Output from Russia’s Soviet-era oil provinces is declining and the country faces high costs and technological challenges at remote new fields to retain its status as the world’s top crude oil producer.

For Sechin, viewed as likely to relinquish a formal cabinet post when Putin returns to the Kremlin, the deals strengthen his political clout and secure his dominance over Russia’s energy industry.

Statoil will be a minority partner with Rosneft in the latest venture, which is modelled on deals struck in the last month with U.S. oil major ExxonMobil and Italian oil firm Eni.

“The terms for everyone are the same,” Khudainatov told reporters after the briefing.

The agreement covers a block in the Barents Sea, the Perseyevsky, and three fields in the Sea of Okhotsk, with overall prospective recoverable resources of 2 billion tonnes of oil and 1.8 trillion cubic metres of gas, Rosneft said.

The four blocks’ resources are far from the largest in Rosneft’s portfolio. Lund, speaking to reporters after the signing, called the projects prospective, with a high risk/reward ratio.

“It falls exactly in line with the strategy,” he said.

Statoil will own 33.3 percent of a joint exploration venture and finance its geological exploration activities. It will also reimburse historical expenses incurred by Rosneft and 33.3 percent of expenses incurred acquiring the licence.

Khudainatov said that if the fields’ resources were confirmed, exploration costs for all four could total $2.5 billion.

“The resource base (of Perseyevsky) is 1.4 billion tonnes, according to current estimates. If that is confirmed (total investment) could be $35-40 billion,” Khudainatov said.

“For Magadan-1, Lisyansky and Kashevarovsky (in the Sea of Okhotsk) we estimate $10-$20 billion, depending on confirmation of resources and difficulty of extraction. I took a minimum number here so as not to scare you.”

Statoil CEO Helge Lund, speaking to journalists later, declined to confirm potential costs, saying they depended on many factors.

Statoil may also pay Rosneft one-off bonuses for each commercial oil and gas discovery depending on the terms of a final agreement, Rosneft said. They intended to place orders for ice-class vessels and drilling platforms with Russian shipyards.

SHTOKMAN PROGRESS

The Statoil deal was widely expected after Lund received support from Putin at a meeting in late March to try to work out a way forward with the Shtokman gas project in the Barents Sea, after nearly two decades of false starts with two investor groups.

The Gazprom-led Shtokman Development consortium, which also counts Total as a partner, is revamping plans for the field, which holds more gas than all of Norway’s continental shelf, into a liquefied natural gas project and will unveil it in late June, sources have said.

Progress on Shtokman was seen as key to Statoil’s access to Russia’s Arctic offshore oil reserves. Rosneft had a total of five blocks in the Barents Sea, near the recently defined maritime border with Norway.

Sources said the Barents Sea blocks were among the most coveted by potential foreign investors. Two of them – with combined prospective resources of around 28 billion barrels of oil equivalent – went to Eni. Two remain. Rosneft also has two blocks in the Sea of Okhotsk.

ENOUGH FOR ALL

Merrill Lynch estimated in a recent research report the top Russian oil company – holder of the world’s largest oil reserves – had 309 billion barrels of hydrocarbon resources in its Arctic offshore licence areas.

Rosneft has several more Arctic fields yet to be assigned partners, and Khudainatov re-iterated he had invited Russian companies to such partnerships as well as foreign oil companies.

Sechin said on Friday the government had formed working groups with two Russian companies on shelf projects.

“Concerning russian companies, as you know, I made offers to all Russian companies wishing to work on the shelf. They were LUKOIL, Bashneft, and TNK-BP.”

“From two companies, TNK-BP and LUKOIL, I received confirmation of the wish to work with us on these projects,” Khudainatov said, adding: “They have to agree to all terms of my offers.”

An attempt by BP to tie up with Rosneft in a venture to develop Arctic offshore zones on the Kara Sea fell apart because of resistance from its local partners in TNK-BP, who said TNK-BP should assume BP’s role in the deal.

Efforts to buy out the Russian shareholders failed, and Exxon Mobil eventually won the deal.

BEIJING: The Arctic and its vast energy reserves, one of the last places on earth where sovereignty has not been established, will be a key focus of Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao’s trip to Europe.

Wen leaves Friday for an eight-day trip that will take him to Iceland, Sweden, Poland and Germany, and will touch on China’s Arctic ambitions as well as the ongoing eurozone debt crisis. Iceland’s strategic location near the Arctic has not gone unnoticed in China, the world’s biggest energy consumer, as the shrinking of the polar ice cap makes the region’s mineral resources more accessible. The retreat of the ice has also opened up the potential for a shorter cargo shipping route with Asia that would cut the sea voyage between Shanghai and northern Europe by some 6,400 kilometres (3,970 miles). “There is great potential for cooperation (with Iceland) in bilateral trade, geothermal energy and the Arctic,” vice foreign minister Song Tao said this week.

Cui Hongjian, head of the European department of the China Institute of International Studies, pointed out that China has been doing research in the Arctic for some time to prepare for development of the region. “Countries closer to the Arctic, such as Iceland, Russia, Canada, and a few other European countries may tend to wish the Arctic is private or that they have priority to develop it,” he said. “But China insists that it is a public area, just like the moon is.”

China’s interest in Iceland came to the fore last year when a Chinese property tycoon tried to buy a large swathe of land in the north of the country for a tourism project. Some observers suggested Huang’s purchase would help China win a foothold in the Arctic region, amid general concern over Chinese investment in Europe. Arni Thor Sigurdsson, head of the Icelandic parliament’s foreign affairs committee, told AFP at the time that “in talks with Icelandic authorities, (the Chinese) have made a point of saying it was very plausible” that China would use the island as a trans-Arctic shipping port. The deal was eventually blocked by the government.

Asked about the setback, Song said Beijing respected “the sovereign rights” of countries bordering the Arctic, and added China was willing to “contribute to peace, stability and sustainability” of the polar region. As part of its ambitions, Beijing is seeking permanent observer status on the Arctic Council, an intergovernmental forum promoting cooperation among eight states bordering the region, including Iceland and Sweden.

Song told reporters this week that China already has Sweden’s backing. But with fellow members Russia and Canada thought to be lukewarm about China’s bid, and with other high-calibre candidates such as the EU, Japan and South Korea in the wings, Beijing will have to bring all its influence to bear.

In this context, Norway — another Arctic Council member state — could play a key role. Diplomatic relations between Oslo and Beijing have been at a standstill since jailed Chinese pro-democracy activist Liu Xiaobo won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2010. The Norwegian foreign minister has said publicly that Oslo supports China’s bid, but sources suggest that behind-the-scenes, Oslo may actually be hampering Beijing’s candidacy.

Norway “is getting fed up with the fact that containers of salmon are being left rotting in Chinese ports and that Beijing keeps asking for official apologies for a Peace Price that was not a government decision,” said Jonathan Holslag of the Brussels Institute of Contemporary China Studies.

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

April 18, 2012

For more information contact:

Kandi Mossett

Indigenous Environmental Network

Native Energy & Climate Campaign Organizer

701.214.1389 iencampusclimate@igc.org

Evictions, Price Gouging, Natural Gas Burn-off, Crumbling Infrastructure, and Death: The energy boom is not progress, it’s waste and extreme violations of human and environmental rights!

New Town, ND – Forced evictions, of local residents from their mobile homes in the New Town area, to provide housing for predominately out-of-state oil workers has reached a new low. On Monday, April 16^th, Four Native American residents of the Prairie Winds Mobile Home Park, including a 9-year old child, were forced to leave their home when landlord, Leroy Olsen, removed Heather Youngbird and Crystal Deegan’s front door. Olsen then cut the electricity and turned off the propane to the home, and told them they had to leave their home immediately.

The battle for housing in North Dakota has been an on-going struggle since the onset of the oil boom in the Bakken Shale Oil Formation, which partially lies in northwestern North Dakota. The housing crisis has been growing exponentially worse, particularly within the million-acre Fort Berthold Indian Reservation; homeland of the Mandan, Hidatsa, Arikara tribal nations.

Crumbling Infrastructure and Severe Housing Shortages

Tribal members, as a result of this boom, are experiencing some of the most severe consequences from the lack of proper infrastructure to support this intensive extractive industry. Infrastructure is inadequate at all levels in North Dakota- from crumbling roads and the lack of proper sewage facilities in the various man camps that have popped up across the state, to a severe shortage of adequate housing.

Who Is Prospering?

It’s estimated that the state of North Dakota, to date, has collected at least $100 million as a result of the oil boom through revenue generated from Fort Berthold alone, while the majority of Fort Berthold residents haven’t seen a dime. In the meantime, roads are crumbling as semi-trucks take over with no regards for safety. Several deaths have occurred over the past few years as a result of accidents between the semis and local Native American residents; at least 6 of the deaths involved young people under the age of 27 with the youngest being 3 years old.

With the “Boom” Comes Guns and Crime

Crime, drug and death rates have increased all across the state as firearm sales have hit an all time high. Prostitution rings are being formed and rape rates for both men and women are on the rise with police enforcement struggling to keep up and yet North Dakota Governor Jack Dalrymple has said, “Build America back on the same blueprint that North Dakota has adopted and our country will surely be rewarded with the same great economy our state is enjoying.”

Gas Flaring – Why are they burning it off?

Additionally, within the Bakken shale formation hydraulic fracturing is being used to extract the oil but the natural gas is being flared off. A New York Times article points out that more than 100 million cubic feet of natural gas is being flared away every single day in North Dakota. That’s enough energy to heat half a million homes for a day. The flared gas also spews at least two million tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere every year, as much as 384,000 cars or a medium-size coal fired power plant would emit. Regulations on flaring are woefully inadequate as well in North Dakota and there are no current federal regulations on flaring for oil and gas wells.

Wind Has Taken a Back Seat to Oil

Perhaps the greatest irony is that North Dakota has the greatest wind resource of any of the lower 48 states. According to National Wind, LLC, “With all of its wind power a class 3 or higher, North Dakota could supply 1.2 trillion kilowatt-hours (kWh) of annual electricity, which is 14,000 times the electricity consumption in the state.” Unfortunately, programs for wind power generation and distribution have recently been cut back within the state while the focus is on the extraction of the oil, with almost no regard to the human health impacts and environmental devastation occurring.

Divided Communities

“This oil boom has divided the Mandan, Hidatsa and Arikara people and pitted them against each other in a negative way,” says tribal member Kandi Mossett. “It’s really hard to see the damaging and negative effects occurring at Fort Berthold and throughout North Dakota as a result of corruption and greed. The reality is that people in positions of power at both the Tribal and State level are lining their own pockets, while the Mandan, Hidatsa & Arikara people suffer and in some cases die as a result of this terrible oil boom. I want people to know the reality we are facing here and to realize that at this rate we are heading toward modern-day genocide of the people, while the BIA and others stand idly by and let it happen.”

The Fight For Prairie Winds – Their Homes & Future

Prairie Winds mobile home residents refuse to stand by while their homes are ripped out from underneath them and held a protest this past Saturday in New Town geared toward Mobile Home Park owner, John Reese. Residents of 45 trailers have until August 31st to move after the mobile home park was sold with plans to develop it to house oil workers. Future Housing LLC bought the property and plans to construct housing for employees of United Prairie Cooperative, formerly Cenex of New Town.

John Reese, the CEO and general manager of United Prairie Cooperative and agent for Future Housing LLC, has said the company is trying to work with the residents. Initially, the eviction deadline was set for May 1, but it’s been postponed until Aug. 31.

The residents have not been given any restitution to help with moving expenses, therefore, if they cannot afford to move their homes they are left with limited options and facing homelessness. “Just because there’s a lot oil around here doesn’t mean we all have money,” said Heather Youngbird of New Town. “We were not even given a formal 30 day eviction notice and now that we have been kicked out of our home we are currently homeless.” Reese said in an interview last month the housing shortage in the area makes it difficult for him to find employees. Available land to develop housing is also difficult to find, he said.

“Right now, anything that’s available that has water and sewer on it is very attractive to anybody that’s trying to continue to grow their business.” On Saturday, Reese said he was aware of the protest but he was out of town planting potatoes. Many of the signs and chants targeted Reese directly.

“I’m just fine with taking the rock beating,” Reese said. Indeed John Reese has proved that he’s fine with displacing people because this isn’t the first time he’s done it. In 2010 he displaced people from the Four Corners trailer court behind the old Charbee’s and the second time he displaced people from the old movie theater apartments on main street. Tribal members are still paying back loans they had to take from the tribe to help pay for the moving expenses.

Climate Change Linked to Waterborne Diseases in Inuit Communities

A recent study may warn of more widespread threats to water quality.

For National Geographic News

Published April 5, 2012

This story is part of a special National Geographic News series on global water issues.

As global warming triggers heavier rainfall and faster snowmelt in the Arctic, Inuit communities in Canada are reporting more cases of illness attributed to pathogens that have washed into surface water and groundwater, according to a new study.

The findings corroborate past research that suggests indigenous people worldwide are being disproportionately affected by climate change. This is because many of them live in regions where the effects are felt first and most strongly, and they might come into closer contact with the natural environment on a daily basis. For example, some indigenous communities lack access to treated water because they are far from urban areas. (See a map of the region.)

“In the north, a lot of [Inuit] communities prefer to drink brook water instead of treated tap water. It’s just a preference,” explained study lead author Sherilee Harper, a Vanier Canada graduate scholar in epidemiology at the University of Guelph in Ontario, Canada. ”Also, when they’re out on the land and hunting or fishing, they don’t have access to tap water, so they drink brook water.”

The experiences of the Inuit and other indigenous communities as they struggle to adapt to changing climate conditions could help guide humanity in the coming years when the effects of climate change are felt universally, scientists say.

“These societies are like crystal balls for understanding what could happen when these changes start materializing over the next few decades down south, as they surely will,” said James Ford of McGill University, an expert in indigenous adaptation to climate change who was not involved in the study.

“Scientists often talk about how if global temperature increases by 4 degrees Celsius [7°F], there will be catastrophic climate change effects, Ford said, “but where I work in the Arctic, we’ve already seen that 4-degree Celsius change.”

(Related: “Indigenous Peoples Can Show Path to Low-Carbon Living“)

Weather and Illness

Ford said the new study is the first to draw a link between climate change and disease in Canadian Arctic communities. “Water issues have been largely neglected in the [climate change] scholarship,” he said.

“Before this study, there was very little understanding of the burden of illness of waterborne disease in the Arctic . . . The baseline that we have from this study will allow us to track whether changes in behavior make a difference in the future,” said Ford.

Harper’s Inuit research, published in a recent issue of the journal EcoHealth, is part of a multiyear comparative study of how extreme weather events affect waterborne disease outbreaks in aboriginal communities around the globe.

The team is conducting similar studies among the Batwa pygmies in Uganda and the Shipibo people in Peru. The trials are still under way, but preliminary results suggest that, like the Inuits, these groups are also starting to feel the health effects of climate change-related weather patterns.

Boosting Native Health Systems

For each of the communities studied, Harper and her team documented the local weather patterns using weather stations; conducted weekly water tests; and searched clinical records for reports of vomiting and diarrhea. The team also conducted surveys to gather information about local lifestyles.

Combining and analyzing these various data together uncovered some interesting patterns. For example, “our research found that after periods of heavy rainfall or rapid snowmelt, there is an increase of bacteria [such as E. coli] in the water, and about two to four weeks later there is an increase in diarrhea and vomiting,” Harper said.

In Uganda, the team found that families that don’t keep their animals in shelters are about three times more likely to get sick after periods of heavy rain. The team suspects pathogens from the animal feces are getting washed into the drinking water.

Harper’s studies are part of a larger endeavor—the Indigenous Health Adaptation to Climate Change, or IHACC, project. It aims to combine science and traditional knowledge to strengthen health systems in indigenous communities.

One of the IHACC project goals is to use data from the studies to advise local policymakers and help develop ways to improve the health of those in the affected communities. Strategies for reducing waterborne disease, for example, might be as simple as building animal enclosures or establishing protected sources of water for drinking, Harper said.

Widespread Changes

In Rigolet, a small Inuit town studied by Harper’s team, the findings from the study have already led to changes in the community, said Charlotte Wolfrey, mayor of the town.

“We’re asking people when they go to their cabin not to drink brook water and instead take water that has been chlorinated to eliminate bacteria,” Wolfrey said. “We also have posters around town reminding people that if they’re going to drink [untreated] water, they need to boil it first.”

Wolfrey, who has spent nearly 40 years of her life in Rigolet, says that climate change has forced the people in her town to question things that were once taken for granted, such as places in the ice where one can safely cross, or seasonal water routes for boats.

“With climate change, that knowledge that was passed down from generation to generation doesn’t count anymore,” she said. “We can’t trust it.”

The lessons learned in Rigolet and other indigenous communities could someday benefit humanity as a whole because their problems could soon become global problems. According to the World Health Organization (WHO), for example, most of the climate change-related disease burden in the 21st century will be due to diarrheal diseases.

“The climate change impact on waterborne disease is not just an Arctic issue, or just an indigenous issue,” Harper said.

McGill University’s Ford agreed. “If we look at what happens in the Arctic and how climate change plays out with its societies and people, we’ll increase our understanding of how as a globe we are going to respond to climate change,” he said.

Ford says his time among the Inuit has made him “cautiously optimistic” that climate change is a problem that humans will be able to adapt to, if not solve.

“When I first went to work up north more than ten years ago, there were all sorts of news reports about how climate change was going to threaten the Inuit. But when I started working with them, the thing that struck me is that many people said, ‘We’re resilient. We’ll adapt.’ So I think we’ll stand a good chance of weathering whatever changes might happen,” Ford said.

But, he added, “Things will have to be done to get there. We can’t just wait and hope we adapt. We have to be proactive.”

• 28 March 2012 by Fred Pearce
• Magazine issue 2858. Subscribe and save
• For similar stories, visit the Climate Change Topic Guide

THE world could buy itself 15 years of breathing space for fighting climate change, one of the world’s top climate modellers argued on Monday.

Peter Cox at the University of Exeter, UK, was speaking at the Planet Under Pressure meeting in London, where more than 2800 scientists gathered to discuss fears that Earth’s life-support systems are under intense stress from human activity.

The trick, he says, is to widen our attack on greenhouse gases from carbon dioxide to include the second most significant greenhouse gas – methane. “Methane is a more important control on global temperature than previously realised. The gas’s influence is much greater than its direct effect on the atmosphere,” says Cox. Curbing methane, he adds, may now be the only way to prevent dangerous warming.

We release methane in many ways – leaks from gas pipelines and coal mines, from landfills, the guts of livestock and rice paddies. Curbing these emissions would bring a manifold benefit for climate, says Cox.

He has studied the way CO₂ and methane influence plant growth, and says that these feedback mechanisms mean action on methane could have twice the expected punch.

An atmosphere containing less methane but more CO₂ would encourage forests and other vegetation on land to absorb more carbon. This would happen in two ways. First, the extra CO₂ would itself act as a fertiliser for vegetation, so it would grow faster and absorb more CO₂. Second, less methane would minimise the formation of tropospheric ozone, which damages plant growth.

These mechanisms are well known, but Cox is the first person to calculate their collective impact on the amount of CO₂ that can be released while keeping global warming below 2 °C – the widely accepted threshold for dangerous climate change.

He told the conference that a 40 per cent reduction in human-caused methane emissions would permit the release of an extra 500 gigatonnes of CO₂ – a third more than previously thought – before we exceeded 2 °C warming. “That is a 15-year breathing space at current CO₂ emission rates,” says Cox, who admits there are uncertainties in his calculations.

“It looks extremely unlikely that we can stop global warming at 2 °C just by reducing CO₂ emissions,” he told New Scientist. “That probably requires peaking emissions by 2020. But drastic action on methane would make the task much more feasible.”

Cox says most governments have become fixated on combating CO₂ emissions, and while that remains essential, the benefits of action on other greenhouses gases have been ignored. He stresses that this is not an excuse to burn more coal. “Nothing in the study contradicts the view that stabilising climate will require large reductions in CO₂ emissions, but it does show the unexpectedly large importance of other gases.”

Cutting methane emissions is cheaper than cutting CO₂ emissions, and brings other benefits. Besides boosting vegetation, reduced tropospheric ozone will increase growth rates for many crops and cut health risks, such as asthma, from air pollution.

John Reilly, an expert on non-CO₂ greenhouse gases at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, agrees that a 40 per cent cut in methane emissions is feasible at relatively low costs. It could be done primarily by curbing leaks from gas fields and pipelines, and emissions from coal mines and landfills. But he warned that to limit warming to 2 °C, “we need to accelerate our efforts on everything”. Even allowing for a 15-year breathing space, Reilly says, “it’s not either CO₂ or methane, it has to be both”.

If the good news is that reducing methane emissions can have a better-than-expected effect on curtailing global warming, then the bad news from Cox’s calculations is that a continued rise in methane emissions would have a more damaging effect than previously supposed. If you let methane go up a lot, then less carbon can be stored in land sinks, Cox warns. Methane is, in effect, the unseen control on how much CO₂ can be safely put into the atmosphere.

Besides climate change, the conference has flagged up the over-pumping of underground water reserves, soil erosion, acidifying oceans, forest loss and the accumulation of human-made nitrogen in rivers and oceans.

The meeting is expected to call on the United Nations Earth Summit 2012, being held in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, in June, to back the creation of an equivalent of the UN Security Council to put environmental security at the heart of world diplomacy.

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