Europe's Arctic adventure - Little Murmansk
The Kimek shipyard: Inhabitants of the north are looking forward to the job opportunities that will come with Arctic development (Photo: Leigh Phillips)
LEIGH PHILLIPS
10.11.2008 @ 17:47 CET
In a four-part series, the EUobserver heads to the Arctic - the very top of Europe - and speaks to oil company executives, environmentalists, government ministers, bio-chemists, engineers, geo-politics experts and the bright young things that are heading to the region ahead of the new ‘Cold Rush' - the bonanza of resource development that is just beginning to take off in this stark, fragile region. In the second part, we look at Kirkenes, a small harbour town sometimes called 'Little Murmansk' for its 10 percent Russian population, and how it is set to be transformed by the oil and gas bonanza opening up as the ice disappears.
EUOBSERVER / KIRKENES - PART TWO - Kirkenes is a small Norwegian harbour town 40 kilometres from the Russian border and 400 kilometres north of the Arctic circle.
Its 3,000-odd inhabitants sometimes refer to their town as "Little Murmansk" for its 10 percent itinerant Russian population that works mainly in the shipyards, although the town was originally called Pisselvnes, which means "piss river headland," until a church, or "kirk" was built in 1862 and the settlement's urinary appellation was replaced with something more pious.
Other than the shipyards, mining for iron ore was for a long time the sole industry connected with Kirkenes. The town is the terminus of the Kirkenes–Bjornevatn Line, the world's most northerly railway (one should point out here that when one visits a place so far north, the descriptor of ‘most northerly' is applied to many things - the most northerly railway, the northernmost university, the northernmost film festival, the farthest north outlet of H&M), which connects Kirkenes with nearby Bjornevatn, where the ore was mined for much of the 20th century. Although the mine closed in 1997, climbing iron prices have convinced Australia's Northern Iron Limited to refurbish the line for a reopening of the mine, perhaps next year.
But the town's hopes lie more with what lies offshore than what's under the ground onshore, as the price of iron can drop one again at any time.
The Kimek shipyard is roughly the same size as the whole of the rest of the town, which says more about the size of the town than the size of the shipyard. Its bricks-and-mortar main building, which stands out noticeably in a town full of wood-frame houses, was one of the last structures standing in Kirkenes at the end of the Second World War. Kirkenes also wins another grim Guiness record in being the region most heavily bombed per capita during the course of the conflict.
The toilets in the hangar at the back bear notices in Russian, not Norwegian, as the company cannot find enough Norwegian workers to complete all the projects in its order books.
Kimek Offshore, meanwhile, a spin-off founded in 2000 that services the infrastructure and engineering needs of the burgeoning Arctic oil and gas industry now dwarfs its shipyard parent company, and it too is sourcing many of its engineers and tradesmen from Russia, and wants the Norwegian government to invest more in applied post-secondary training so that it can fill the growing number of job openings.
The town is only a short distance from the Barents Sea and from Russian harbours. Kimek's main aim is to exploit its prime location to participate in Russia's development of Shtokman. On the Russian side of the sea, Shtokman is home to one of the largest gas fields in the world.
These three companies - Kimek Offshore, North Energy and Mabcent - and dozens of other firms just starting up are providing the sort of high-quality, high-pay jobs that will last and, they hope, transform the region.
Small wonder then that the chiefs of Kimek have little time for the concerns of environmentalists from Oslo or Brussels.
Trond Haukenes, the former chairman of the board of Kimek and now a consultant with the company, recognises that the Arctic is melting, but he says this is nothing to be alarmed about, as it's happened before.
He points out that William Barentz, the Dutch navigator after whom the Barents Sea is named, was sailing in open seas north of Spitsbergen, the largest island in the Svalbard archipelago, back in the 15th century.
"So we know there have been periods where there has been less ice and more ice. [The melting] could happen for a short time and then the ice comes back," he says. "We don't know."
The company's general manager, Greger Mannsverk, just thinks the green groups are a bunch of Chicken Littles out to shake down governments and donors for additional research grants: "If you look at what's going on over a short period, it looks like the end of the world, but over the long term, there's always been changes. I don't think it's as dramatic as this."
"But then the more dramatic you say it is, the more money you get to do projects," he smiles.
BarentsObserver
Jonas Karlsbakk is a young, easygoing, Facebooking, cross-country skiing advisor with the Norwegian Barents Secretariat, a resource centre that supports Norwegian-Russian co-operation in the north. Indeed many of the staff with the secretariat, which, with support from the Norwegian government, the EU and the US, delivers grants to joint Norwegian-Russian business, cultural, youth and environmental projects, are eager 20- and 30-somethings.
The casually dressed, highly educated troop of Barents boosters look and sound like they should be working at a Google or a Flickr in someplace like San Francisco or Seattle instead of the Land of the Midnight Sun.
They've launched their own online newspaper, the BarentsObserver, which, not coincidentally, bears more than a passing resemblance to EUobserver's old version of its website. "We love the EUobserver," Jonas enthuses when your correspondent meets him, saying he hopes to produce a similar publication but for the far north of Europe.
These young people give off the kind of vibe that they're in on the ground floor with an exciting new Web 2.0 or biotech firm, and are just as eager as the more typically managerial hard-hatted company men that head up Kimek to see northern Norway - and northern Russia as well - take off.
But Jonas too thinks the environmentalists are not striking the right balance.
"The polar debate is too, ah, polarised. The green groups are putting forward an opinion that's destroying a part of the environmental cause," he laments.
"Of course we need to keep our eyes on the environment, especially when we are developing oil and gas, and there's no doubt about the changes, but it's difficult to say what is man-made and what is not ... If it warms up a bit, it won't hurt anyone."
In the third part of the EUobserver's look at the politics and business of the melting Arctic, we look at the reality behind the "scramble for the Arctic" headlines, and speak to the Norwegian deputy defence minister who is worried what the recent Russian-Georgian conflict portends for the Arctic while we also hear people say over and over again "It was the Red Army that liberated the north, you know."
Part One - 'The new cold rush for resources'
