I expect the Russian
Prirazlomnaya rig going productive in the Arctic this summer. May be it happend already, last thing I read was final test were started. I wish my Russian would work without the help of Google Translate. I was next to two students speaking Russian in the metro the week before and it sounded so special and interestingly different to my ears. However from time to time I manage to copy paste Cyrillic words into Google and look what happens.
Platform London has an eye on this
monstrous pioneer of Arctic drilling. If you read the story how the rig was constructed and how the regulators closed all eyes, you can't imagine it will be the first offshore in the Arctic operating year round in a place with only few ice free months.
A constant shuttle service will deliver the crude to a floating storage and offloading vessel near Murmansk, so this presents another possible point of failure. Any spill will first pollute the surrounding coast, then get picked up by the Transpolar Drift and eventually pollutes Greenland's coasts.
Despite Russia has a considerable icebreaker fleet, I'm not eager to learn about their oil spill containment capabilities. The field has reserves of 610 million barrels, that's less than 2 month of the world's crude oil consumption.