Although outside the main scope of these pages, the size of potential reserves, as well as the present Sakhalin development
http://www.eia.doe.gov/emeu/cabs/Sakhalin/Background.html
http://www.eia.doe.gov/emeu/cabs/sakhalin_1204_wk.html
means that we must pay the east some attention. An excellent source of updating will of course be the Murmansk November conference of the Arctic Shelf Association There was a helpful preliminary presentation at the 2004 meeting, on the Sea of Okhotsk, and Shell made a good presentation on Sakhalin as a model for the west.
Sakhalin has also been a useful guide to Russian legislation (English, Russian) However, the foreign majors already in Sakhalin do not seem able to use their experience to enter the Western Arctic.
Out of that 197 exploration well total, including 51 in the Barents Sea and only 13 in the Kara Sea, proving reserves actually even larger than the Barents. 81 go to Sakhalin/Sea of Japan areas, where the potential of the Sea of Okhotsk has been hardly scratched and the Kurils Islands dispute keeps it all Russian to Japanese chagrin. http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/english/doc/2004-11/15/content_391469.htm
Map of the whole island arc, http://artedi.fish.washington.edu/okhotskia/ikip/Results/dbmaps/index.htm leading to a detailed map of southern islands.
All in all, the scale of operations required for Russian Arctic Shelf development is so gigantic that, even in the opening stages, it is obvious that major involvement of foreign skills and finance will be needed. The experience of Norway and the UK in developing an offshore industry from zero in the 1970s suggests that Russia will learn quickly. She has gigantic engineering resources and substantial cities in the right places: Murmansk the port, and Arhangel'sk for offshore structures. It seems likely that Norwegian enterprises will play a disproportionate role. Norsk Hydro has made a good start helping to train subcontractors, but this is only the beginning of a huge venture for the Northmen.
Such is no more than might be expected of Pomor development: the old trading zone between Arhangel'sk and Tromsø knew no boundaries by sea or by land. It even had its own Creole – RussNorsk which only died out in Soviet times. http://www.pomor.no/nor/articles.php?conID=6 Some think it was just Norwegian with a lot of Russian words; it is certainly true that Norwegians and Russians can master each other’s language to an astonishing degree.
Finland with her thousand km of EU border to Russia is the obvious link to the Baltic and northern Europe for everything from containers to pipelines. But, none of these developments will proceed without a high oil price. Failure to pay attention to developments in Iran and the Caucasus, with their cheap oil and gas, guarantees failure to understand one of the risks which made and then destroyed the Canadian Arctic Frontier in the 1970s and 1980s.