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beneath less than five hundred metres of water, with the remaining
third being in deep ocean that is considered to have little hydrocarbon
potential. Some of the one-third above water has already been explored
and exploited, notably America's Alaska North Slope and Russia's west
Siberian basin. And these drillings have contributed to estimates of what
may lie undiscovered in the rest of the Arctic region.
In a report released in Science magazine in May 2009, the US Geological
Survey estimated that about 30 percent of the world's undiscovered gas
and 13 percent of the world's undiscovered oil may lie within the Arctic
Circle. Most of these resources are believed to be offshore, but in depths
of less than five hundred metres of water. This ought to make them com-
mercially viable (though this was not investigated by the USGS survey,
which takes no account of technical or economic factors).
Arctic oil (billion barrels)
>10
1-10
0.1-1
<0.1
Area not quantitatively assessed
Area of low petroleum potential
 
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