The workers searching for gas in the icy Russian Arctic – a photo essay
2022 – The Russian Arctic region, an area of 7,000 sq km atop the planet stretching from Finland to Alaska on which Moscow bureaucrats bestowed the name Zone of Absolute Discomfort, is wretched to live in, but just hospitable enough to allow for the extraction of resources trapped beneath it.
Gas extractors burn off excess condensate in the Russian Arctic tundra. The practice, called ‘flaring’, is harmful to the environment.
In recent decades, as scientists discover billions of tons of additional oil and gas trapped underneath the Arctic tundra, the Kremlin has commanded Russian energy companies to usurp these strategic resources.
Engineers and miners from around the world work short stints in the region, looking for natural wealth deposits several kilometres below the tundra. They come with expensive, sophisticated equipment and earn substantial sums for their hardship tours.
Engineers work surrounded by ice at a gas-drilling site in Novy Urengoy.
Workers connecting gas pipes during the night; and spraying steam over operating pipelines to stop them freezing on a cold morning when the temperature dropped to -42C.
An overview of Novy Urengoi, a city built by Gazprom in the 1980s to exploit some of the world’s largest gas fields. The Ice City in Novy Urengoy.
When I was living in Moscow in 2009, the former Guardian journalist Tom Parfitt and I took a train towards the north pole for an adventure. The landscape grew desolate as the train headed towards darkness during the 40-hour journey; the trees shrank, and then disappeared all together when we reach the end of the line.
Unused to the polar cold, I was knocked over by a snow blizzard, my knees buckling under the weight of my backpack that I could not lift across the snow. I screamed with pain as frostbite attacked my fingers and toes; it was later I realised that numbness was far worse.
Bashneft, an oil and gas company, arrives with its workers and containers (left, in blue) after an attempt by a rival exploration firm was abandoned (right, covered in snow). Bashneft plans to build a gas well here in the Nenets autonomous region.
One day, while trudging through the snow, I stumbled on the edge of town upon rows and rows of white containers, which appeared grey under the piles of snow. Inside, geologists, truck drivers and technicians plotted the day’s search for natural gas. I entered uninvited.
A colony is set up in the tundra, hundreds of kilometres from civilisation, to prospect for oil and gas; lightbulbs are delivered to a colony drilling outpost; the cooks are the only females on site and typically stay for the entire winter.
Sitting at the end of this corridor of joined-up containers, 58-year-old Igor commanded 100 men by phone and walkie talkie in search of the gaseous treasure. His company used trucks fitted with seismic radar to scan the Earth’s crust for fossil deposits. They are the frontline explorers, the wild north pioneers.
Igor, a stern, chain-smoking boss, must have felt sorry for me when I knocked on his cubicle door. A lone foreigner, struggling with Russian, covered in snow, I looked and felt miserable. He offered me tea, and I asked if I could follow and photograph his men in search of gas.
“If you really want,” Igor said, without expression. “Our snow truck leaves tonight for a gas field an eight-hour drive away. There is a spare seat, but don’t expect any sleep”.
A boxy orange vehicle with doughnut wheels taller than me took us bouncing across the tundra to an ungodly cold and dark patch of nowhere. All around you could hear the sound of hissing, then loud whirls, as workers sprayed the gas tanks with hot steam to prevent them from freezing.
My real journey into the Arctic had begun.
Tents, or ‘chums’, belonging to Nentsi herders stand in the Arctic tundra.
A Nentsi herder rounds up his reindeer in -40C conditions. The reindeer meat is sold to sausage factories; the antlers to China for use as a traditional medicine.
Workers test a drilling rig at a gas field in the delta of the Pechora river, 37 miles from Naryan-Mar city. In 1979, an explosion in one of the wells polluted the surrounding tundra, including the Pechora river. After another explosion it closed in 1981, was designated a nature reserve, a status removed in 2007 by decree so drilling for newly discovered gas could resume, a move condemned by environmentalists.
In this region, contrasting ways of life simultaneously exploit resources amid the world’s harshest conditions. For hundreds of years, this part of the Russian Arctic was home only to the Nenets, who raise reindeer for meat and have benefited from an uptick in demand for antlers, which are now sold as an aphrodisiac in China.
Every winter, workers build ice roads in the tundra to serve gas and oil companies; and every summer, the roads melt away into marshland.
When the Soviet government tried to force these nomads into collective farms, some were re-settled in apartment blocks, abruptly altering their way of life. Mounted jet aircraft stand sentry over cities used and abused by the Soviet government, and descendants of Stalin’s prisons populate the streets.
A war monument stands above Murmansk, the world’s largest Arctic city and a vital industrial and shipping hub. Close to the borders of Finland and Norway, the city became an important military base during the cold war.
Though the gulags were abandoned in the 1950s after Stalin’s death, many former inmates chose to stay. The Soviet government built housing blocks and communities for those who worked in the mines, and used high salaries to attract newcomers. The area boomed, for a while, but the regime scarred the once-pristine land with giant sinkholes and pollutants.
Vorkuta is a coalmining and former gulag town 1,200 miles north-east of Moscow, beyond the Arctic Circle, where winter temperatures drop to -50C. Here, whole villages are being slowly deserted and reclaimed by snow, while financial difficulties squeeze mining companies that already struggle to find workers.
Only one family is left living in this apartment block on the edge of Vorkuta.
Nina Merzlikina, 75, and Sergei Kostenko, 45, have packed up their belongings at their apartment in Vorkuta as they wait to be evicted. Local officials want to close the village on the city outskirts so that they can shut off its supply of gas and electricity.
When the Soviet Union collapsed, mines and factories closed, blighting a generation in the Arctic region with poverty and alcoholism. Many fled to seek a future; those who chose to stay often don’t work, age rapidly and die young.
Simyon, a reindeer herder, travels by sled from his chum towards Vorkuta to buy supplies; Karp, a coalminer, walks through Yor Shor, an abandoned village near Vorkuta, where he is among the last 10 inhabitants.
Valery, a miner and union representative in Severny village outside Vorkuta, is comforted by his partner, Lena.
The Russian government is again conquering the far north to stake its dominance.
This crucial period fascinates me so much that I have been back to the Arctic and Siberian region 10 times in the last decade, each time getting to know more of the story and pushing my body and my cameras to their limits.
The Lukoil terminal, off Russia’s Arctic shore, is the world’s most northerly oil terminal, according to Guinness World Records. It serves tankers using the Arctic route between Europe and Asia, and is another step in Russia’s push towards the north pole. The two ships are ice-breakers that work around the clock.
A Lukoil worker repairs a leaking pipe in the Komi region.
From that first day meeting Igor, I have got to know the Arctic and its people well and learned to capture its essence through photography.
The Russian military have granted me unprecedented access to photograph strategic zones, energy companies commission me to photograph their technology, and Igor no longer sees me as that lost foreigner who came to the Arctic without a plan.
They know I’m now here to depict energy politics’ coldest battle front.
Gazprom’s Portovaya compressor station prepares Russian gas before it is piped under the Baltic Sea to Europe. Natural gas from much of Russia arrives at this hub. It is the last stop between Russia and Europe, and a strategic site for Moscow’s gas diplomacy.