The Arctic – a cold wasteland that has shattered the expansion dreams of many an oil company by proving to be too difficult and too expensive to tackle. And, of course, Arctic exploration is the target of major environmentalist opposition to any intervention in this wasteland that is in fact home to unique and very fragile eco-systems. Neither cost, nor environmentalist opposition, however, has stopped Gazprom Neft from making the first steps in Arctic oil and gas exploration. Its Prirazlomnaya platform, producing oil from a field of the same name in the Sea of Pechora, is the first active Russian oil and gas Arctic project, but it will certainly not be the last. Russia is currently the largest crude oil producer in the world , though sometimes it swaps places with Saudi Arabia. It’s also the world’s second-largest gas producer, after the U.S. About half of Russian […]