The facts on BP's Northstar project

Ever since the discovery of the massive Prudhoe Bay oil field on Alaska's North Slope in 1968, the oil industry has longed to search for and develop offshore. Extreme Arctic conditions and the immensely powerful and shifting Arctic ice pack meant that exploration, and particularly production, would be extremely expensive and risky. Flying in the face of it's 'green' rhetoric and pronouncements on the dangers of climate change, BP Amoco is now trying to move offshore, to develop new oil which will inevitably add to the burden of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere.