For the past ten years, photographer Justin Jin has been taking his cameras to the frozen north of Russia to follow the people prospecting for and extracting lucrative natural gas
Words and photos by Justin Jin
It’s 2022 in the Russian Arctic, a 7,000-kilometre-long region set atop the planet, stretching from Finland to Alaska, on which Moscow bureaucrats bestowed the name the ‘Zone of Absolute Discomfort’. It’s a wretched place to live, but just hospitable enough to allow for the extraction of the precious resources trapped beneath.
In recent decades, following the discovery of billions of tonnes of oil and gas trapped underneath the Arctic tundra, the Kremlin has commanded Russian energy companies to extract these strategic resources. It built pipelines to Europe, which came to depend on Russia for some 40 per cent of its natural gas needs.
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Engineers and miners from around the world work short stints in the region, looking for deposits located several kilometres below the tundra. They come with expensive, sophisticated equipment and earn substantial sums for their tour of hardship.
When I was living in Moscow in 2009, a friend and I took a train towards the North Pole, looking for an adventure. The landscape grew increasingly desolate as the train headed into darkness during the 40-hour journey; the trees shrank and then disappeared altogether when we reached the end of the line.
Unused to the Arctic conditions, I was knocked over in a blizzard, my knees buckling under the weight of my backpack, which I could barely carry across the snow. I screamed with pain as frostbite attacked my fingers and toes; it was only later that I realised the numbness was far worse.
One day, while trudging through the snow at the edge of town, I came upon rows and rows of white shipping containers, which appeared to be grey under the piles of snow. Inside, geologists, truck drivers and technicians were plotting the day’s search for natural gas deposits. I entered uninvited.
Sitting at the end of this corridor of joined-up containers, 58-year-old Igor Gotz commanded some 100 men in the search for gas by phone and walkie-talkie. His company uses trucks fitted with seismic radar to scan the Earth’s crust for fossil fuel deposits. These were the front-line explorers, the wild-north pioneers. Igor, a stern, chain-smoking boss, must have felt sorry for me as 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 as they searched for gas.
‘If you really want,’ Igor said, without expression, ‘our snow truck leaves tonight for a gas field eight hours 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 steam to prevent them from freezing. My real journey into the Arctic had begun.
I had entered a place where 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 who today benefit from an increased demand for antlers, which are sold as an aphrodisiac in China.
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. Today, mounted jet aircraft stand sentry over cities used and abused by the Soviet government, and the descendants of Stalin’s prisoners populate the streets.
Alhough the gulags were abandoned during the 1950s, after Stalin’s death, many former inmates chose to stay. The 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 toxic pollutants.
When the Soviet Union collapsed, mines and factories closed, dooming an entire generation in the Russian Arctic to poverty and alcoholism. Today, many flee to seek a better future; those who stay often don’t work, age rapidly and die young.
The Russian government is again trying to conquer the Far North. I’ve been back to the Siberian Arctic some ten times over the past decade, each time getting to know more of the story and pushing my body and my cameras to their limits. From that first day meeting Igor, I’ve got to know the Arctic and its people well and learnt to capture its essence through photography.
The Russian military granted me unprecedented access to photograph the strategic zones, energy companies showed me 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
Relying on Russian energy imports
Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has highlighted the dependence of some countries, particularly those in the EU, on imports of oil and gas from Russia. Of the roughly five million barrels of crude oil that Russia exports each day, more than half goes to Europe, while Russian gas accounts for about 40 per cent of the EU’s natural gas imports. The UK and the USA are less dependent – Russian imports account for eight per cent of total UK oil demand and three per cent of US demand. Russia only provides about five per cent of the UK’s gas supplies; the USA doesn’t import any Russian gas.
In the wake of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Western countries have announced new restrictions on Russian hydrocarbon imports. The USA has announced a complete ban on Russian oil, gas and coal. The UK is to end all imports of Russian coal and oil by end of 2022, and the EU is reducing its Russian gas imports by two-thirds. The EU has proposed a plan to make Europe independent from Russian fossil fuels before 2030 – including measures to diversify gas supplies and replace gas in heating and power generation.
Russia’s actions have also put approval of the Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline on hold. The pipeline between Russia and Germany, which runs alongside the already operating Nord Stream, was completed last September but doesn’t yet have an operating licence. Germany announced that this would be put on hold following Russia’s formal recognition of two breakaway regions in eastern Ukraine.
Transitioning away from Russian energy imports won’t be quick or easy, given the existence of already-operating pipelines, the challenges of ramping up other energy sources, and the difficulty of finding new suppliers (especially for gas). Germany and Italy are particularly vulnerable due to the amount of gas they import. In March, it was reported that Germany was reactivating coal-fired power plants amid Russian threats to turn off the gas tap.
