RockyMtnGuy
"They (The IEA) produced a wonderful study indicating that 25% of the world's oil reserves were in the arctic. As it happens, I worked for a company that ran a drilling fleet of 26 vessels in the Canadian Arctic Ocean for a decade or so. We also drilled a lot of wells in the MacKenzie Delta, and ran seismic surveys off the coast of Greenland. Some people I knew also got involved in Russian oil exploration, which was mostly an exercise in fighting Russian bureaucracy. While we found a lot of interesting things, we didn't find any commercial amounts of oil. It's drastically different from the Gulf of Mexico, which is what I assume the USGS is comparing it to. There's oil, but not enough to justify the costs. There's lots of natural gas, some tar sands, and some huge diamond deposits (now, that's what any geologist with a fully functional crystal ball would have gone after had they only known). But not much oil."