In all, the Arctic may hold 20-30% of the world's undiscovered oil reserves.
An oft-quoted figure that the region contains 25% of the world's undiscovered oil and gas is generally attributed to America's Geological Survey.
The U.S. Geological Survey estimated in 2008 that some 22% of the world's undiscovered oil and natural-gas deposits are located above the Arctic Circle.
Last year, the US Geological Survey estimated the Arctic could be home to 30% of the world's undiscovered natural gas reserves and 13% of its undiscovered oil.
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The Arctic is stocked with minerals that were hitherto largely inaccessible, including an estimated 30% of undiscovered reserves of natural gas and 13% of undiscovered oil reserves.
During the last five years, when undiscovered oil fields have become a scarce commodity, Africa has contributed one in every four barrels of new petroleum discovered outside North America.
The US Geological Survey estimates that the Arctic has around a quarter of the world's undiscovered and recoverable oil and gas reserves.
In a 2012 update, the USGS put the mean undiscovered estimate of recoverable oil in Russia's Arctic provinces alone at 28 billion barrels, plus about 27 trillion cubic meters of gas.
These new sources can be within the current fields (think fracking in oil), as yet undiscovered fields (the Arctic), or previously known fields where technology now enables access (deep-sea extraction).
However, despite the fact that proven Russian oil reserves are still vast, and that Russia probably has very large undiscovered deposits, it will be practically impossible to achieve this goal because of structural deficiencies in the market structure (taxation on revenue instead of profit).
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