Russia Discovers Oil & Gas Reserves In British's Antarctic Territory
Russia has recently discovered huge oil & gas reserves in the Antarctic, whose most area is claimed by the UK. As per Russian research ships, reserves totaling 511bn barrels of oil are reportedly found. Which is 10 times the North Sea’s entire 50-year outp...
The problem then becomes how can we extract and transport this precious fuel to the whole world without incident.
Even without enemy activities, the extreme temperatures and weather within the region poses rather significant engineering and logistic challenges that needs to be overcome, and I am not sure if our current technology can address these challenges at reasonable prices.
Russia is pretty far ahead in exactly that area. They’ve had to solve these issues for their own territory so they know how to do it.
Maybe, but how about doing so at sea?
They will need a logistical chain that can transport food and supplies from Russia to Antarctica and transport oil safely from Antarctica back to Russia or allied refinery locations that are closer. The distances involved is almost 10k miles in one direction; a truly daunting distance for sea-farers.
The ships will need to handle temperature swings from Tropical Heat to Bitter Cold, survive traitorous waters like no where else on Earth, and avoid icebergs or two. Heard that current Russian Military Ships have problems with warmer water chocking out their boilers, so I am not sure if the civilian ships are better equipped.
There will also need to be a capable task force on hand to deal with any accidents and prevent ecological disasters from getting out of hand. Even Russia's allies would probably not want to see another Exxon Valdez Oil Spill occurring.
So yeah, they might have experience doing so on land and in their backyard, but Russia needs to see if they can do it at sea and on the other side of the globe, because that is an entirely different story.
Nice high-effort comment! Interesting points. This stuff certainly isn't easy.