More signs of Arctic oil show up

Look east of Greenland and north of Iceland, and you’ll see the newest area in the Arctic Ocean that could hide huge oil reserves. (IMAGE FROM GOOGLE MAPS)

There’s not much to see on the volcanic island of Jan Mayen — it’s what lies offshore which interests oil-hungry Norway. (PHOTO COURTESY OF THE ALFRED WEGENER INSTITUTE)

If you look 550 kilometres northeast of Iceland and 500 km east of Greenland on a map, you’ll see nothing but blue ocean.

It’s what lies under the seabed there that has Norway smelling oil.

Sampling near Jan Mayen island, about 900 km northwest of Norway, has revealed traces of the kind of sandstone that often contains oil.

“The samples from the seabed around Jan Mayen are outstanding,” the Norwegian Petroleum Directorate’s head of exploration, Sissel Eriksen, said in a Nov. 22 statement. “We don’t yet have enough information for the NPD to give a resource estimate for the area, but we are very optimistic after seeing the data.”

Seismic mapping is expected to move ahead there in 2012.

Plans also include an impact assessment study around Jan Mayen, the first step towards opening the area to oil companies.

British Petroleum, Europe’s second-largest oil company, has said the Arctic Ocean may hold around 200 billion barrels of oil, much of it as yet undiscovered.