Oil executives looking for the next massive source of petroleum have turned toward the Arctic for decades. Studies by the US government suggest the area above the Arctic Circle could hold as many as 90 billion barrels of oil and nearly 1,700 trillion cubic feet of natural gas.
The oil alone would be enough to sustain the entirety of global demand for nearly three years if all other drilling worldwide were to cease tomorrow.
At the center of these ambitions is Greenland, where some of the harshest conditions on Earth protect stores that have drawn in prospectors looking for the chance at another discovery the size of Alaska’s Prudhoe Bay.
A company called March GL, which will be renamed Greenland Energy Company after it goes public this year, is hoping to vault itself into the upper echelons of the industry by extracting some of these billions of barrels of oil from a peninsula called Jameson Land sticking off the eastern coast of Greenland, the largest island in the world. The oil could be transformative for the US and European markets likely to receive it, injecting a massive wave of new supply that could help wean Europe from its dependence on Russian petroleum, currently under a steep sanctions regime as its war in Ukraine rages on.
In late October, Yahoo Finance accompanied March GL CEO and veteran oilman Robert Price, alongside the company’s lead petroleum engineer, to a town called Tasiilaq on Greenland’s eastern coast, where March GL’s contractors were preparing to store a collection of heavy machinery in town for the winter.
Price had been planning to barge the earthmovers up to Jameson Land, where they would begin constructing a three-mile-long road from the coast to the inland site where March GL will be drilling its first wells. Rough seas off the island’s eastern coast left the tugboat with which the company planned to haul the equipment unable to make the journey; by late autumn, the window of ice-free water to make this trip was closing too quickly to wait for a new one.
Instead, March GL’s team will keep much of its equipment in Tasiilaq until the spring or summer, when the ice will thaw, compressing their timelines — a testament to the tenuous-at-best operating conditions in Greenland.
Since that trip, the complexities of Price’s Greenland ambitions have only increased.
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