Centre for High North Logistics graphic

If or when?

Russian President Vladimir Putin might find his army bogged down in a messy and wasteful war in Ukraine, but he appears to be winning the battle against nature’s long, icy lock on the waters of the Arctic Ocean.

Despite problematic ice conditions last summer and into the fall, the Centre for High North Logistics is reporting that Northern Sea Route traffic in 2025 was again up from the year before. Meanwhile, Western sanctions tied to the war in Ukraine have brought back to mother Russia icebreaker construction once outsourced to shipyards in Korea and Turkey.

“The shipbuilding is one key element of (a) broader plan,” reports The Maritime Executive, a trade publication. It said the Russians “have defined 155 activities to support the development over the next decade. This will also include the formation of a cargo base and the modernization of the infrastructure. They will also further develop the shipping lane.

“….Russia will construct 10 more icebreakers along with 46 rescue vessels. To support the operations, they plan three rescue fleet bases to be developed along the Northern Sea Route. According to Deputy Prime Minister Yuri Trutnev, this will ensure that they can maintain year-round navigation through the Arctic.”

Increasing Arctic Ocean and Bering Sea ship traffic, the volume of which remains little in comparsion to the lines of ocean-going vessels still transiting the Suez Canal, might seem of little interest to Americans living far to the south or even to Alaska’s Anchorage-centric population.

But there is one large, troubling aspect to the increase in traffic, as duly noted in the High North report.

Oil “tankers remained the dominant cargo category on the NSR in 2025,” it reported, citing “34 tanker transits, split into large crude carriers, smaller oil tankers, and westbound repositioning voyages.

“Large crude oil tankers – those with greater than 70,000 deadweight tonnage (DWT) – constituted the core of oil exports, with vessels from both Murmansk and Baltic ports carrying shipments eastbound.”

Exxon Valdez legacy

Many Alaskans still have memories of what can happen when large oil tankers are involved in wrecks that end up gushing millions of gallons of crude oil into marine waters. After the Exxon Valdez, a 214,000 DWT vessel, hit Bligh Reef near Valdez in 1989, it leaked about 21 percent of its cargo, or approximately 45,000 DWT.

That 11 million gallons of crude smeared Prince William Sound. Then, as winds and currents moved the oil into the Gulf of Alaska, the spill grew as seawater oil emulsified to form nasty water-in-oil mousse.

That mousse spread north and west to contaminate an estimated 1,300 miles of Alaska coastline.

Seabird colonies in the Barren Islands, 250 miles to the northwest of the spill off the entrance to Cook Inlet, were especially hard hit. Researchers later estimated the spill killed 100,000 to 300,000 murres and other seabirds and concluded the spill “probably devastated” the 129,000-strong colony of murres in the Barrens.

And the messy mousse didn’t stop there. It kept flowing north and west as far as the village of Chignik on the Alaska Peninsula, while contaminating Kodiak Island and Cook Inlet along the way, according to a National Park Service history. 

 The oily mousse led the Alaska Department of Fish and Game to close fisheries for salmon, herring, crab, shrimp, rockfish and sablefish in Prince William Sound, Cook Inlet, along the outer Kenai coast, around Kodiak and along the Alaska Peninsula.

A federal court jury hearing lawsuits filed against Exxon in the wake of the spill later calculated that commercial fishermen forced to stop fishing becuase of the mousse lost $287 million.

The Bering Strait between the Arctic Ocean and the Bering Sea is only 51 miles wide, almost assuring any tanker accident with a spill near there would foul Alaska shores. To the south of the entrance, Nome, the largest community in Northwest Alaska, sits only 160 miles from the international border between the U.S. and Russia.

Russian tankers transit Russian waters in the Bering Sea, but in the event of a spill, Russian oil could easily end up smearing Nome; Kotzebue, the second largest community in Northwest Alaska; and the Bering Land Bridge National Preserve on the Seward Peninsula that juts out into the Bering Sea between the two communities.

Oil spill response lacking

The U.S. has almost no resources available in the area to try to deal with a major oil spill, and no country has any experience in cleaning up a major crude oil spill in icy Arctic waters. Canadians scientists who have been studying the issue as that country’s Hudson Bay becomes ever more accessible do not sound optimistic about what can be done in icy waters.

And they question whether an Arctic ecosystem could recover as quickly and as well as that of Prince William Sound, where commercial fishermen have seen years of record salmon harvests in the wake of the Exxon Valdez spill.

“A natural remedy that has previously helped counter oil spills will be too slow to do any useful work if there’s a spill in the Canadian Arctic, increasing chances of ‘catastrophic’ harm,” the CBC reported them concluding as of July of last year.

The story noted that in the case of the Deepwater Horizon blowout in the Gulf of Mexico, which spewed out 134 million gallons of crude before it was shut down, microbes were eventually credited with cleaning “up nearly 10 times more than  humans did.”

Exactly how much environmental damage that 2010 underwater, wellhead blowout did and how long it will take the Gulf to fully recovery is still being debated and studied, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

That spill took place in an area with a large and active oil industry equipped with a lot of equipment and expertise for use in dealing with oil spills. Northwest Alaska has none of that.

Some Alaskans were happy to see Royal Dutch Shell abandon plans for offshore oil production in the region in 2015, thinking that Alaska had been protected from the prospects of oil causing havoc in U.S. Arctic waters.

The environmental group Greenpeace proclaimed Shell’s departure a major victory in a statement declaring that “together we helped force one of the world’s most powerful oil companies to leave the Arctic and moved the Obama administration to close the door to Arctic oil drilling for the next two years.

“Together, we won. Every voice mattered. Each action worked. This incredible victory is a sign of hope. While there’s still more to do to ensure permanent protection for the Arctic, here’s a look back on what’s become one of the most inspiring and powerful movements for environmental justice in recent history.”

Now, it is looking more and more like Alaska has been set up to face all of the risks of oil spills with none of the benefits of oil production.

The National Academies’ National Research Council has reported that oil exploration and extraction result in only about a third the volume of marine pollution as oil spills and pipeline ruptures, although the reality is that both – no matter how bad they might look when they happen – play minor roles in global pollution compared to the oil contamination of the environment daily ignored by almosts everyone.

“Nearly 85 percent of the 29 million gallons of petroleum that enter North American ocean waters each year as a result of human activities comes from land-based runoff, polluted rivers, airplanes, and small boats and jet skis, while less than 8 percent comes from tanker or pipeline spills,” the Academies reported in 2002. “Oil exploration and extraction are responsible for only 3 percent of the petroleum that enters the sea. Another 47 million gallons seep into the ocean naturally from the seafloor.”

A 20-year update on that report that came out in 2022 concluded that improvements had been made in preventing spills related to oil extraction and transport, but observed that “in North American waters, estimated ocean oil pollution from land-based runoff is up to 20 times higher than it was 20 years ago.”

But the report didn’t dismiss the still obvious dangers of drilling and shipping spills, and nothing in that regard had really changed from 2002, when Louisiana State University professor James M. Coleman, the chairman of the committee that wrote the 2022 report, observed that improvements don’t “mean we can ignore hazards from drilling and shipping.

“Although new safety standards and advances in technology reduced the amount of oil that spilled during extraction and transport in the last two decades, the potential is still there for a large spill, especially in regions with lax safety controls.”

One might add violent weather as another risk associated with transport, and that can only leave Alaskans pondering how good Russian “safety controls” in a world where it is trying to move oil from the Arctic to Asian markets as cheaply as possible to help fund its war in Ukraine in a situation where the U.S. has little, if any, leverage to pressure Russian into putting safety before profits when transiting the Bering Sea.