Arctic oil spills worry Russian officials

According to a long report from Canada's National Post (via the Calgary Herald), Russian officials are also concerned about government and industry's ability to mitigate and clean up an oil accident in the Arctic. The concerns, aired at an oil conference on Sakhalin Island, are being expressed more often as the country moves forward with opening its northern regions to oil and gas operations, including offshore. "I have attended 13 of the 14 Sakhalin oil conferences, and this is the first where government regulators were visibly and vocally concerned about offshore oil spill risks," says Michael Bradshaw, an expert on Russia's Far East energy industry and professor at the University of Leicester. Read much, much more, here. Incidentally, the article mentions another obstacle to Arctic clean-up that Alaska Beat had been overlooking: Darkness.