An issue that keeps coming up again and again with respect to the rapidly changing arctic is that as the arctic becomes more accessible, so do its vast reserves of oil and natural gas. So I think it's really worthwhile to focus in on this issue and we'll do a kind of country by country. A good place to start is with Russia. Now, Key Points, Russia turns out to be the world's 3rd largest oil producer and is rapidly developing oil and natural gas reserves in the arctic, oil and natural gas tend to be found in the same place. If you find one, you tend to find the other. Now, this production is both onshore and offshore in the arctic. The big players here are two companies, Gazprom and Rosneft. There's a growing use of the Northern sea route to support these activities. Now, this table here is showing the leading oil producers as of 2018. In that red rectangle, I'm just focusing in on the four largest producers. As we see at this point, United States now is the leading producer of oil, about 18 million barrels a day. Saudi Arabia comes in second place and there's Russia in at number three at about 11 million barrel, a little bit more than that and Canada at about 5.4 million barrels a day. So Russia turns out that, that's about 11 percent of daily oil consumption. Daily oil consumption for the globe is something like 95 million barrels and that's a lot of oil that's used. Russia produces about 11 percent of that. Now, here's an interesting question. How much oil is in a barrel of oil? The answer is 42 gallons. You might think it's 55. We think about a barrel of something and usually we think it's a 55 gallon drum. But no oil through historical issues, just history, turns out to be 42 gallons, considerably smaller thing, a barrel of oil. So it is an odd unit of a barrel of oil, but that's what we've been using and it's going to stick. Now, this map is from an assessment from the United States Geological Survey, and it's of undiscovered oil in the North Polar region, I have always often ask the question, how does one make an assessment of what is undiscovered? But apparently you can. The point being here is that all of those areas in green are the areas where there is a lot of oil and natural gas. I put on that little blue oval there to focus in on the Russian side of the arctic. The point is within that blue oval, there's a lot of areas that have that green. So there's a lot of oil and natural gas. Now, as I mentioned, one of the real big players is Gazprom, and there is its logo right there on that image. Now, what is Gazprom? It's a multinational energy corporation headquartered in St. Petersburg, Russia. Sales in 2019, US $120 billion. That's a lot, right? Turns out to be the largest publicly traded natural gas company in the world and the largest company by revenue in Russia. So it's a big thing. The other big one is Rosneft, and here's the Rosneft logo I'm showing here. Now, what is Rosneft? It's an integrated energy company headquartered in Moscow. It's the second-largest state controlled company after Gazprom in revenue and it's very international, it operates in more than 20 different countries. Now, so what's Gazprom doing? Well, one of the big things they're doing is developing a new gas field on the Yamal Peninsula, estimated to hold 2 billion cubic meters of natural gas, one of Russia's largest fields and stretches out into the Kara Sea, and the Kara Sea that's one of those shallow coastal continental margin seas. It turns out as of January 2020, at least the numbers I've found is that Gazprom holds 32 licenses in the Yamal Peninsula area. Now, this map is just showing the major Russian gas basins where lot of gas is produced. It's showing you this huge pipeline network, this huge gas fields, including the one on the Yamal Peninsula, which I just noticed. I mean, the point being here is that Russia produces a heck of a lot of natural gas and internationally holds a great deal of muscle because of that, because it supplies many different nations with natural gas. Here's a map showing some of the Yamal activities as of 2018, showing just different sites where a lot of the production is going on, where a lot of the pipelines have been put in. Major operation both onshore, right on land and offshore. Now, people talk about gas. Well, what is gas? What is it? All right, what is natural gas actually made of? The answer is, it's mostly methane, the simplest of the hydrocarbon, CH4, the carbon with four hydrogen atoms around it. Very simple hydrocarbon. It is colorless and odorless. People think that, it smells bad. Well, no, that's an additive that's put in there to make it smell bad, the terrible rotten egg smell and it's put in there for safety simply. So if a gas leak, you can smell it and take action, because natural gas is mostly all methane. Some of it is ethane a little bit of it is ethane, and that's a two carbons. It's a two-carbon chain. But yeah, natural gases are mostly methane. Now, let's turn to Rosneft. Rosneft offshore license areas where they're doing a lot of drilling. You can see them kind of all of the yellow. This is all in Russian, so I'm not going to try and read it for you, but they hold all of these different licenses, so just you see where that production is going to be occurring over those licenses are held as completely all the way along the Siberian goes or along the Russian Coast, it really goes all the way from west to east and it makes sense that now as we start to develop, or Russia starts to develop those resources, you're going to see more and more use of the Northern Sea Route. Now, Russian investments. In February 2020, Russia announced a 210 billion euro, that's euro dollars, plan for arctic oil and gas development. So it's a big investment going on here. As I just mentioned, that will lead to increase shipping along the Northern Sea Route and developments both offshore and on land. So the conclusion here is there are tremendous stores of oil and natural gas in Arctic Russia and Russia is really going gung whole on producing this. So Russia is a huge player here. In Arctic economic that's probably going to be one of the reasons to see increased ship traffic along the Northern Sea route already happening, of course, but we'll see more of it. So with that, I hope you understand now a little bit more about what's going on in terms of oil and natural gas production in Russia. Thank you.
