Original Material
Oil Pipeline on Thin Ice
The Risks Behind Rosneft’s New Megaproject
In September 2026, Rosneft plans to begin the first oil shipments from the coast of the Taymyr Peninsula as part of its Vostok Oil megaproject. The idea for the project was first put forward in 2019 by Rosneft CEO Igor Sechin, who promised to create a “world-class” oil cluster and to secure cargo flow along the Northern Sea Route. The plan includes building two thousand kilometers of trunk pipelines and roughly seven thousand kilometers of inter-field pipelines.
Rosneft projected high profitability for the project, citing the eco-friendliness of the Arctic oil, which the company claims will meet “the growing needs of the global economy for eco-friendly energy resources.” Vostok Oil was originally supposed to launch in 2024. Two years behind schedule, the project now aims to ship around 30 million tons of oil by December 2026. Throughout this time, the company has been building large-scale infrastructure in the tundra zone of the Yamalo-Nenets Autonomous Okrug and Krasnoyarsk Krai — a zone that is extremely sensitive to external disturbance.
Industrial development comes at a high cost to the Arctic. And this isn’t just about the trillions of rubles invested in the project itself. The Arctic is more vulnerable to human impact than other regions. Oil development places significant strain on northern territories and carries growing risks for ecosystems and for the stability of infrastructure built on permafrost. All of this is unfolding against a backdrop of Russia's aging oil pipeline infrastructure and chronic oil leaks.
Reading time: approximately 20 minutes.
- The first section introduces oil production in the Russian Arctic, the Vostok Oil project, and the problem of oil pollution.
- The second section explains how pipeline ruptures and oil leaks result from aging infrastructure.
- The third section examines the thawing of permafrost and the risks it poses to oil infrastructure.
- The fourth section explores the environmental impacts of oil production.
- The fifth section explains why companies often find it more cost-effective to pay fines than to prevent accidents, and examines the challenges of monitoring oil leaks.
- The final section summarizes the key findings.
Oil Cluster in Risk Zone
More than two thousand square kilometers of Black Sea coastal waters were contaminated with fuel oil after the Volgoneft tanker wreck; 20,000 tons of diesel fuel spilled into the tundra and rivers near Norilsk following a fuel tank accident; dozens of tons of oil ended up in the soil and the Kolva River in the Yamalo-Nenets Autonomous Okrug after a pipeline rupture. These are just a few of the major accidents in recent years that have released oil products into the environment. We often find out about oil spills through media reports that focus on the largest incidents. But the problem of oil leaks is far broader than that.
Causing serious harm to nature and people doesn’t require spilling tons of fuel all at once; regular, localized pipeline ruptures occur constantly across Russia and attract almost no attention, while still inflicting irreparable damage on the environment.Oil pollution hits the Arctic even harder than other regions: low temperatures, the effects of the climate crisis, unstable permafrost soils, and the remoteness of these territories all raise the risk of oil spills, posing a significant threat to the region’s fragile ecosystem.
At the same time, the Arctic is a magnet for oil producers. In 2020, the Russian Arctic accounted for 19% of all Russian oil production — 97.6 million tons — and by 2035 that share is meant to rise to 26%.
Oil is currently extracted actively in the Komi Republic, the Nenets Autonomous Okrug, the Barents Sea shelf, the Yamalo-Nenets Autonomous Okrug, and Krasnoyarsk Krai.
The Yamalo-Nenets Autonomous Okrug and Krasnoyarsk Krai together account for a significant share of all oil extracted in Russia’s Arctic zone: by some estimates, around 65% and 27% respectively. For Krasnoyarsk Krai, a large portion of that output comes from the Vankor cluster of fields in the north of the region, where Rosneft launched industrial development and extraction 17 years ago. Alongside it, Rosneft’s sphere of interest also includes the Payakha cluster of fields on the Taymyr Peninsula.
In total, 13 fields in the Yamalo-Nenets Autonomous Okrug and Krasnoyarsk Krai form a resource base of 6.5 to 7 billion tons of oil for Rosneft’s Arctic megaproject Vostok Oil.
The core task of Vostok Oil is to link these Arctic fields into a single transport network connecting them to the Sever Bay port on the Kara Sea. From there, oil will be shipped by tankers along the Northern Sea Route to markets in the Asia-Pacific region and India. To this end, Rosneft is building enormous infrastructure that includes two thousand kilometers of trunk pipelines and roughly seven thousand kilometers of inter-field pipelines.
As of June 2026, an estimated 700 kilometers of pipeline have already been welded, and according to Rosneft CEO Igor Sechin, the Bukhta Sever port will be ready to begin shipping oil as early as September, becoming a key oil hub in the Russian Arctic.
Building Vostok Oil has required enormous investment, estimated in 2024 at 11.8 trillion rubles (approximately €118 billion, based on the average exchange rate for 2024). That is one-third more than the planned budget expenditure for the entire Healthcare Development state program until 2030.
Yet the project's economic rationale remains in question, since, according to some experts, the pace of infrastructure construction significantly outstrips the actual development of the resource base.
At the same time, the new pipelines are being built not to replace but to supplement the existing infrastructure, and so they do nothing to solve the problem of persistent oil leaks across the Arctic’s oil-and-gas regions: pipeline ruptures and oil leaks of varying scale occur continuously across the northern oil regions.
Pipes Age, Oil Leaks
According to data from the Central Dispatching Directorate of the Fuel and Energy Complex, 14,716 oil pipeline ruptures were recorded in Russia in 2023.
About 90% of such accidents are caused by metal corrosion. More than 250,000 kilometers of oil pipelines run across Russia, and more than half of them are worn out. Among Russian companies, this figure ranges from 35% to over 80%. Rosneft, for instance, has 59% of its pipelines in a deteriorated state.This is largely because companies often continue to use infrastructure dating back to the Soviet era. In the absence of strict legal limits on service life, they can extend the operating life of old pipelines again and again.
To reduce the scale of pipeline ruptures, experts from environmental organizations propose capping the service life of oil pipelines, setting a maximum limit of 25–30 years.
“Any oil spill is somebody's fault and somebody’s failure to do their job properly: there's always a human factor involved, a desire to cut costs on quality, on the scope of pipeline diagnostics,” explains Sergei, an environmental activist and resident of one of the Arctic oil-producing regions. According to him, oil spills and leaks appeared as soon as oil extraction began. But today the spills are becoming larger simply because production volumes have grown.
In the Yamalo-Nenets Autonomous Okrug alone, inspections carried out from 2022 to 2024 revealed regular, monthly oil spill incidents at RN-Purneftegaz, a Rosneft subsidiary. The Okrug’s Department of Natural Resources and Environmental Protection assessed the scale of the identified contamination at 6.8 hectares and 82.4 million rubles (approximately 818 million euro, based on the average exchange rate for 2024) in damages. And in 2024, inspections on forest fund land being developed by RN-Purneftegaz and Kharampurneftegaz found contamination covering 17.5 hectares, with damages estimated at 244 million rubles.
Data on the real scale of contamination remain fragmentary, much like the reports of oil spills themselves; the overall picture can only be pieced together from inspection results, official data, and media reports, which capture only part of the problem.
For example, according to calculations by Important Stories, the area of land contaminated with oil products in 2020 amounted to 55,000 hectares. Yet in Russia’s Arctic zone, Rosprirodnadzor recorded only 645 hectares of disturbed land in 2022. Since around 19% of all oil extracted in the country comes from the Russian Arctic, and given the region's harsh climatic conditions and the extensive reach of its infrastructure, it stands to reason that the agency’s estimate is out of step with the true scale of the contamination.
Pipes on Melting Ground
According to Ministry of Natural Resources estimates from as early as 2022, about 40% of infrastructure built on permafrost had already been deformed. Permafrost thaw is directly linked to the intense impact of climate change on the Arctic — the fastest-warming region in the world, where average temperatures are rising 3 to 4 times faster than the global average. Scientists project that for every 1.1-degree rise in temperature, thaw could destroy 3.9 million square kilometers of permafrost territory.
Arctic infrastructure was often built with the expectation of solid, permanently frozen ground. But as the Arctic warms, the surface layers of permafrost thaw, and roads, homes, industrial facilities, and infrastructure lose their stability.
Forecasts suggest that by 2050, the bearing capacity of soils across 70% of Russia's Arctic zone will decline by 15% or more. The potential economic damage from permafrost thaw could reach five to ten trillion rubles (approximately 56–112 billion euros), with direct losses to industry and energy amounting to as much as five trillion rubles annually, according to Mikhail Yulkin, founder and CEO of CarbonLab.
Given these high risks, companies are paying increasing attention to the problem of soil thaw, but because of the sheer scale of the infrastructure and of the permafrost itself, which covers 65% of Russia's territory, monitoring soil temperatures everywhere is an extremely difficult task — not just at the corporate level, but at the state level as well. Russia still lacks a unified monitoring system. As Sergei Muzychenko, Deputy Head of the Ministry of Construction, has noted, facilities designed for 50 years or more of operation are effectively being engineered with little insight into the conditions they will face over their lifetime.
How Russia is trying to build a system for monitoring permafrost thaw
According to scientific estimates, 45% of hydrocarbon deposits in the Russian Arctic are located in regions where soil thaw could cause serious damage to infrastructure, including oil pipelines.Construction at polar latitudes is usually carried out in winter, at extremely low temperatures around minus 40 degrees Celsius; once operational, the pipelines carry oil products whose temperature can be well above freezing. This significant temperature contrast causes the metal to expand thermally. Combined with thawing soils, this can lead to pipeline deformation. Construction work also destroys vegetation cover, which disrupts the thermal balance of the permafrost, causing the soil to warm and thaw even further.
Seasonal processes create additional risks for pipelines. In winter, moisture within the soil migrates toward colder zones and freezes. The expanding ice forms frost heaves and icing mounds that can push the pipeline upward, causing geodetic shifts and ruptures. In summer, the reverse process occurs: the underground ice that expanded over winter thaws, which can cause the ground to subside and the pipe to sag.
The long-distance pipelines of Vostok Oil are mostly elevated: they are mounted on piles driven into the permafrost. This is a common approach to pipeline construction in the Arctic. The Trans-Alaska Pipeline, for instance, is likewise raised above the ground on piles. As far back as the 1970s, engineers took construction conditions into account and tried to adapt the technology to permafrost thaw. To keep the ground beneath the pipeline frozen, engineers equipped the infrastructure with passive cooling systems — thermosyphons, which extend deep into the ground and passively vent heat to the surface.
This technology is still used today. Thermosyphons are most effective precisely under conditions of a large temperature difference between soil and air — meaning they work best during harsh polar winters. But because winters in Alaska, as in the Russian Arctic, are becoming milder, and average air temperatures are gradually rising, this technology is steadily losing its effectiveness. This is compounded by the fact that thermosyphons can only cool the permafrost within a limited zone along the pipeline itself, while the surrounding ground continues to thaw and shift.
At current rates of warming, localized engineering solutions can no longer guarantee the safety and stability of industrial pipelines; the risks of deformation and loss of containment are rising in step with the climate crisis. And that crisis, in turn, is being worsened in part by the very oil being burned after traveling through these pipes.How Oil Poisons the Environment
Rosneft presents Vostok Oil as a “green” project and claims it will “meet the growing needs of the global economy for environmentally friendly energy resources.” The company points to the low sulfur content of the fuel, measures to utilize associated gas, and plans to build supporting renewable energy capacity.
But such measures don't make oil environmentally friendly. Oil products make a significant contribution to greenhouse gas emissions and air pollution when burned, and when spilled, they poison soils, bodies of water, and marine ecosystems.
Oil is classified as a toxic substance and contains carcinogenic compounds; depending on the concentration of particularly hazardous impurities, its hazard class can range from moderate to highly dangerous.
A major accident isn’t necessary to cause significant, lasting environmental damage. Regular, ongoing impacts — such as leaks from oil pipelines — are enough on their own. Studies have shown that for soils in the middle taiga and Western Siberia, destructive processes begin once oil products reach a concentration of 50 grams of oil per kilogram of soil.
Because of its composition, a spill contaminates the environment on several levels at once. Volatile compounds enter the air and seep into groundwater, spreading toxic contamination far beyond the site of the spill. Heavier fractions — resins, asphaltenes, and fuel oil — remain on the surface, forming a barrier that blocks air, water, and nutrients from reaching the soil, effectively cutting plants and soil organisms off from what they need to survive.
Seeping through the ground or entering bodies of water directly, oil products form a film that also blocks oxygen from reaching the water. They also coat any living organisms that come into contact with them — mammals and birds, for instance — in a toxic film.
The polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons and heavy metals contained in oil can accumulate in organisms and travel up the food chain, moving from soil to plants, animals, and humans. In fish, plankton, birds, mammals, and reptiles, they cause developmental abnormalities, reduced reproductive capacity, and poisoning that ultimately leads to death.
According to environmental activist Sergei, if a spill isn’t contained, the oil ends up in waterways: “That's a real disaster for local people, who end up dealing with the consequences of the spill. Especially for those who end up ingesting oil products through fish meat, through animal meat, through milk — if the cows were grazing in meadows where the oil spilled. Often people simply aren’t given reliable information about the condition of their drinking water sources, their rivers. The information is most likely being withheld by the Emergency Situations Ministry or Rospotrebnadzor.”
But even when a spill is contained, it's impossible to fully eliminate the negative effects of oil contamination, and the environment can take decades to recover.
In the Arctic, low temperatures and the particular nature of the soil slow the breakdown of these compounds even further, meaning toxic substances persist in the environment far longer than they would, say, in chernozem soil conditions. This is critically dangerous for the fragile ecosystems of the northern regions, which are already under strain from a changing environment amid abnormal temperature increases.A separate problem is the release of oil products into the northern seas. Vostok Oil plans to use its pipeline infrastructure to channel oil from fields in the Yamalo-Nenets Autonomous Okrug and Krasnoyarsk Krai to the Bukhta Sever port on the Yenisei Gulf shore of the Taymyr Peninsula. According to Rosneft representatives, the project’s core objective is to contribute to increasing cargo traffic along the Northern Sea Route.
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The company plans to transport petroleum products along the NSR using Arc7 ice-class tankers. These vessels are custom-built to operate in northern seas, capable of navigating independently through first-year ice up to 2.1 meters thick. However, in certain sections of the Northern Sea Route (NSR), ice thickness can reach up to 3 meters depending on the season. Therefore, even for these specialized vessels, icebreaker escort along the NSR is recommended year-round, particularly during winter.
“The risk of an oil or fuel spill from Arc7 tankers is fairly low, especially since new tankers are planned for use. But given Russia’s ongoing war in Ukraine and international sanctions on Russian oil, there’s a real possibility that during the summer-fall navigation season, shadow-fleet tankers without ice class will be sent to ship oil directly to Asian buyers — and that’s a genuine accident and spill risk. Shadow-fleet tankers tend to be old, carry questionable insurance, and are often in unknown technical condition,” says Ksenia Vakhrusheva, an expert with the Arctic project of the Bellona international environmental organization.
The harsh conditions and often unpredictable ice situation along the Northern Sea Route create risks of accidents involving oil spills. In Arctic waters, cleaning up such spills is practically impossible. The length of the NSR, the difficulty of navigating the route, and the lack of infrastructure all slow down the emergency response.
The oil film that forms on the surface after a spill can also seep under the ice, which, due to its porous structure, absorbs the spilled oil products and subsequently carries the contamination over enormous distances. In addition, oil becomes more viscous in cold water and retains its toxicity longer than it would in warm water.
Such spills are often fatal for Arctic wildlife. Oil products that coat fur and feathers destroy the animal’s insulation; animals and birds die quickly as they are no longer able to protect themselves from the cold.It’s worth noting that transporting oil products along the Northern Sea Route affects the environment even without accidents or spills, simply because of the heavy fuel oil used by ships. Burning this fuel produces greenhouse gas emissions and black carbon — soot that settles on surfaces, directly polluting the environment and reducing the reflectivity (albedo) of ice. Once released into the atmosphere, black carbon traps heat 1,600 times more effectively than carbon dioxide. Ice coated in oil or black soot absorbs more heat and melts faster, further accelerating the warming of the Arctic.
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Why Oversight Doesn’t Work
It is often more cost-effective for Russian oil companies operating in the Arctic and other regions to pay fines and compensation for environmental damage than to invest systematically in spill prevention and the replacement of aging pipelines, as the cost of overhauling or replacing old pipelines far exceeds the one-off penalties.Transneft, the operator of Russia’s pipeline infrastructure, allocates around 250 billion rubles (nearly 2,8 billion euros) annually for pipeline repair and reconstruction. Meanwhile, underinvestment in the modernization of Rosneft’s pipelines in the Khanty-Mansi Autonomous Okrug alone was estimated at roughly 200 billion rubles (approximately 2,7 billion euros, based on the average exchange rate for 2018) annually back in 2018. Yet fines and compensation payments for individual accidents typically amount to only tens or hundreds of millions of rubles — as seen, for example, in the results of forest fund inspections in the Yamalo-Nenets Autonomous Okrug.
Under these conditions, companies may treat environmental payments as an operational risk rather than a reason to make long-term investments in infrastructure. In other words, this approach allows environmental liability to function as a kind of “spill tax” rather than as a tool for reducing risk and preventing future accidents.
In addition, because pipeline infrastructure stretches across such vast distances, “minor” spills are difficult to track and easier to conceal. They often occur in remote, sparsely populated areas that regulatory bodies don’t always reach, and companies can simply ignore photo and video evidence from eyewitnesses. Under Russian law, even fines for failing to report an oil spill do not exceed one million rubles (nearly 11 thousand euros) for companies.
Anna Yezhak, a Greenpeace expert for Central and Eastern Europe, points out that the Arctic also has a number of inherent characteristics that make monitoring difficult in the region: it is a vast but sparsely populated territory with poorly developed transport infrastructure and extreme climatic conditions. Under such conditions, promptly detecting and cleaning up spills is difficult even setting aside the institutional constraints of present-day Russia.
Environmental activist Sergei echoes this: “A significant number of spills happen in hard-to-reach places. We simply can’t track them — in the sense that we can't physically get there. It’s remote, there are checkpoints. So we don't actually know how the government agencies operate there, or whether they even show up.”
The monitoring problem is also borne out by wildly divergent estimates. While still serving as Minister of Natural Resources and the Environmental Protection, Sergei Donskoy said that, according to public environmental organizations, equipment wear and tear causes more than 25,000 accidental spills in Russia every year, but no more than 5,000 of them come to the attention of regulatory bodies. Estimates of the volume of contamination diverge even more sharply: oil companies reported no more than 10,000 tons of oil products spilled per year, while public organizations estimated the true figure at more than 1.5 million tons.
Environmental activist Sergei believes that part of the monitoring problem could be addressed through greater openness and public oversight. According to him, modern communication tools would make it possible to give the public access to information about the condition of oil facilities, but companies withhold it under the pretext of security. Under that same pretext, he says, local residents are barred from areas where they used to fish, hunt, and gather mushrooms, and where drilling rigs and wells now stand instead.
“What matters is openness, accessibility for independent [monitoring], and the role of public oversight by local residents, who have no stake in any corrupt schemes,”
According to Anna Yezhak, the situation with spill and leak monitoring is further worsened by the degradation of environmental oversight more broadly. Regional environmental agencies are effectively dependent on extractive corporations, grassroots environmental oversight has been suppressed by repressive legislation, and environmental information can be withheld under the pretext of protecting commercial confidentiality. At the same time, the redirection of government funds toward military needs has left environmental program budgets underfunded.
“The international sanctions and capital flight that followed the invasion of Ukraine have deprived businesses both of access to advanced monitoring systems and of any incentive to invest in the long-term modernization of infrastructure,” Anna Yezhak adds.
Expansion at the Arctic's Expense
Oil production in the Arctic has significant, wide-ranging impacts on the region’s climate and ecosystems. New oil projects bring additional greenhouse gas emissions, increased shipping and black carbon emissions, as well as expanded pipeline infrastructure built on increasingly unstable thawing permafrost — creating more potential sources of leaks.
Many such leaks may go unrecorded in official statistics and receive little media attention. Smaller spills in hard-to-reach areas are more difficult to detect, verify, and bring into the public eye: they do not always come to the attention of regulators and rarely receive broad coverage. As a result, environmental damage may continue to accumulate quietly, while climate-related risks to oil infrastructure continue to grow.
As long as penalties for individual violations remain negligible compared with the cost of upgrading infrastructure and preventing accidents, it is cheaper to compensate for damage already done than to invest in preventing it. Environmentalists, activists, and entire organizations are facing increasing pressure from the state. In addition, the government is limiting the capacity of independent environmental oversight mechanisms. New oil megaprojects like Vostok Oil will add further harm and new risks on top of the enormous damage the oil industry has already inflicted on the Arctic's environment and its people over decades.
Russian, and before that Soviet, extractive industry has never shown much concern for the Arctic environment, as evidenced by the industrial clusters around Norilsk, Vorkuta, Murmansk, and Usinsk. Now, in the fifth year of Russia's full-scale war in Ukraine, as Russia tries to sell its resources on the world market while circumventing international sanctions, there are reasons to believe that environmental considerations rank near the bottom of Rosneft's priorities for developing the Arctic.
“Right now, the Russian state and its extractive companies continue to treat the region as a source of natural resources — the priority of economically developing the Arctic is declared in every official document,” says Ksenia Vakhrusheva, an expert with the Arctic project of the Bellona international environmental organization. “And this ‘development’ is happening with no regard for the ecological condition of a region that is especially vulnerable to human impact. Russia’s oil extraction in the Arctic makes a substantial contribution to worsening global climate change, pollutes the environment for decades to come, and the proceeds from oil sales go toward continuing the war in Ukraine. To reduce these negative consequences under current conditions, it’s necessary to limit Russia's ability to build oil-extraction infrastructure and sell Arctic oil on the international market.”
Photo Cover by Pavel Gurenchuk / Wikimedia Commons.
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