NOAA
Fire boat response crews battle the blazing remnants of the off shore oil rig Deepwater Horizon, April 21, 2010.
Climate change, compounded by conflicts in Gaza and Ukraine, threatens an oil disaster off the coast of Alaska, potentially devastating Indigenous communities and the nation’s richest fishing grounds. This danger arises from increasing oil traffic between Russia and China through Arctic waters bordering the United States.
On August 29, Houthi rebels in Yemen attacked the Greek-flagged oil tanker Sounion in the Red Sea. A month later, it continues to burn and threaten a catastrophic oil spill, according to the United Nations. This incident is part of a broader trend of increased Houthi attacks on shipping since the Gaza war began. To avoid these dangers, many vessels are now rerouting around the southern tip of Africa. However, oil shipments have also been increasing through the Russian-controlled Northern Sea Route (NSR) in the Arctic, a pathway made navigable by melting sea ice due to climate change.
In late August, the Azerbaijani-run Prisma, the largest crude oil tanker to use the NSR through the Arctic Ocean and the Chukchi and Bering Seas, transited from Russia to China carrying some one million barrels of oil on board and passing through the fifty-five-mile-wide Bering Strait between mainland Russia and the state of Alaska. Until then, all oil traffic on this route has been carried by Russian tankers as a way to help fund the war in Ukraine.
China has become the largest buyer of cheap Russian crude oil, purchasing 52 percent of it since Western sanctions were imposed on Russia following its February 2022 invasion of Ukraine. Russia began shipping oil to China via the NSR in November 2022.
In 2023, oil tanker exports from Russia to China totaled 10.4 million barrels carried aboard thirteen shipments. This summer, at least six Russian ships plus the Prisma have made the journey. Last year, Russia announced it would start using non-ice certified oil tankers. In September 2023 the first conventional oil tanker not built for ice, the Leonid Loza, traveled from Murmansk to Ningbo, China without incident.
Historically, every new frontier in offshore oil exploration and shipping (beginning with nineteenth century oil piers off Summerland, California) has resulted in major accidents and oil spills, including the Exxon Valdez tanker spill in Alaska in 1989 and the Deepwater Horizon platform explosion and oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico in 2010.
Andrew Hartsig, Arctic program director for the Ocean Conservancy, says he’s worried about “letting non-ice class tankers through and just the increase in volume of traffic.” The U.S. Coast Guard told The Progressive that it “closely tracks Russian traffic through the Bering Strait,” and is prepared to respond to any spills. Oil spill response organizations maintain spill caches throughout Alaska, but the cache closest to the Bering strait is in Nome, 130 miles away.
Steve White of the Marine Exchange of Alaska, a nonprofit tracking weather and vessel traffic, warns that an oil spill in the Bering Strait could devastate Indigenous communities reliant on subsistence fishing and hunting and gathering. These communities are already struggling with declining stocks of halibut, salmon, walrus, seabirds, and whales due to climate change.
“Subsistence resources, the environment and culture are vital aspects of Alaska’s First People and the public at large,” notes the Nome-based Kawerak, Inc., a tribal consortium serving twenty federally-recognized tribes in Western Alaska. Kawerak recently set up a marine program in part to “propose actions to minimize negative impacts of increased shipping in the Bering and Chukchi Seas.”
However, neither Alaska Native communities nor U.S. authorities have much sway over Russia’s oil trade with China. Last year, Russia canceled a planned joint oil spill response exercise with the U.S. Coast Guard. The region has also seen escalating military activity. Joint Russian-Chinese exercises in the Arctic have led to confrontations with U.S. and Canadian forces in recent months, further heightening tensions.
Limited steps that could be taken to influence Russia would include working with the United Nations, the Arctic Council (which is made up of eight Arctic states and six Indigenous organizations), and at the next COP climate summit to discourage the use of non-ice-certified vessels and restore joint oil spill response exercises.
More importantly, the United States needs to continue the Biden-Harris Administration’s efforts to lead the world in a rapid transition away from fossil fuels in order to reduce the need for high-risk oil shipments and to address the growing climate catastrophe.
This column was produced for Progressive Perspectives, a project of The Progressive magazine, and distributed by Tribune News Service.