More than 15 million tons of oil will be shipped through the Barents Sea in 2009, the authors of a new oil transport report say. In 2015, oil shipments in the area could amount to more than 100 million tons.
The report written by Aleksey Bambulyak and Bjørn Fransen for the Norwegian Barents Secretariat shows a continued increase in the amount of Russian oil shipped through the Barents Sea. While 12 million tons of oil was transported in the area in 2008, the amount is expected to increase with more than three millions to 15 million this year, the researchers from the Akvaplan-Niva institute in Tromsø, Norway, maintain.

That is up from only two million tons of oil in 2002.

Half of the oil will be crude shipped from Lukoil