LONDON — In one of the most remote towns on Earth, on the frozen crust of Greenland’s east coast, the American oilman made his pitch.
Near to the very room where they were all sitting, he told a crowd of Greenlanders, could be as much as 13 billion barrels of oil. His company planned to drill two exploratory wells, and if it struck oil, it could be a major worldwide discovery bringing much-needed jobs, loads of tax money, and relief to world energy markets.
The people who attended the meeting, which was held in June in an isolated town called Ittoqqortoormiit, had some questions.
Why would Greenland get only 15% of the profit?
What kind of chemicals would be used?
And what about the musk ox? (Musk ox hunting is a big deal up there.)
The meeting wrapped up with a lot of unhappy people filing out, according to a video of it that was shared with the New York Times, and a showdown over oil exploration has now joined the cloud of issues swirling over Greenland.
The wildcat oil project is being pumped up by Dr. Phil McGraw, the TV personality known as Dr. Phil, and Gov. Jeff Landry of Louisiana, both powerful allies of President Donald Trump. It’s the latest push by the MAGA camp to close in on this gigantic Arctic island that Trump threatened to annex and remains a fixation of his.
If the discovery is anything close to what the company says, and if it makes economic sense for major production — and those are two enormous ifs — this project could thrust Greenland into a radically different future, possibly as an Arctic petrostate.
But it’s off to a bumpy start. After a wave of negative publicity, protests by Greenlanders, and a slipup by the project’s organizers who have a drilling license, Greenland’s authorities tapped the brakes. This week, the government pushed back the timeline for granting final approvals, saying that it’s unlikely any drilling would be authorized before 2028.
The Texas-based firm leading the project, Greenland Energy Co., now says it will focus on drilling only one well, not two. And the delays are expected to cost millions. As a result, Greenland Energy’s share price has plummeted, trading at little more than a dollar, half its value from just days ago.
A few years ago, Greenland declared it was suspending oil exploration. The Arctic is among the fastest-warming regions in the world, and the Greenlandic government felt it was wrong to contribute more fossil fuel pollution.
But the oil prospectors in this case are operating with a valid license granted before the policy changed, according to documents reviewed by the New York Times. So Greenlandic officials, who have been trying to navigate the intense pressure Trump has put on them, find themselves in a tight spot.
They are more than aware that if they reflexively block Americans from drilling, especially at a time when world events have squeezed the global oil supply, that could give Trump the pretext he needs to return to his threats to “get” Greenland, “one way or the other.” At the same time, there’s obvious resistance from ordinary Greenlanders and government officials to the project.
“In a world where Donald Trump has pursued such a confrontational policy toward Greenland, you can’t help but be a little concerned,” said Mikkel Runge Olesen, a senior researcher at the Danish Institute for International Studies. “If you suddenly throw a major oil discovery into the mix, who knows what might happen.”
For months, the United States, Greenland, and Denmark — the island’s former colonial master that still controls many of its affairs — have been locked in sticky negotiations over the island’s future. One key issue has been America’s access to Greenland’s natural resources.
Ever since Trump set his sights on the island, Greenland has become a magnet for investors and allies chasing Arctic resource dreams. But oil has never been easy.
Chevron and Shell prospected decades ago with no success. It’s incredibly expensive to build an oil industry from scratch in one of the most remote and inhospitable places on the planet. Most of Greenland is covered in ice. One major U.S. company, ARCO, decades ago sank today’s equivalent of $250 million — far more than the $80 million the current players have raised — into seismic studies in the same area, only to abandon the project in 1990.
“There are so many red flags here,” said Naaja Nathanielsen, Greenland’s former minister of natural resources and now a representative in Denmark’s parliament. She said she hasn’t seen any hard data supporting the project’s tantalizing claims, adding, “I think they are selling hot air.”
Not so, say the backers of the project, a joint venture between Greenland Energy, the small, publicly traded U.S. company that raised the money, and 80 Mile Plc, a British outfit that acquired the drilling licenses several years ago.
Roderick McIllree, 80 Mile’s executive director and a board member of Greenland Energy, said this stretch of Greenland had the same geology as the North Sea oil fields, where European countries have extracted billions of barrels. And climate change is working in their favor, he said.
Warming temperatures mean less ice clogging Greenland’s coast, making any oil discovered cheaper to export than it would have been decades ago, he said.
One investor is the Citadel hedge fund, run by investment titan Ken Griffin, and the Trump administration fully supports the project.
“Greenland could be exporting 2 million barrels of oil a day,” said Landry, Trump’s special envoy to Greenland, in a Fox News interview in May. He added, “Think about what kind of pressure that would relieve in the Straits of Hormuz.”
Before the project is allowed to start, its plans, including a detailed environmental assessment, must be approved. But the organizers have been moving ahead anyway and recently carried out two disputed equipment transfers.
First, they brought in a barge load of equipment from another part of Greenland on what authorities said was an expired permit. Jorgen Hammeken-Holm, the head of Greenland’s mineral resources department, called the move “naughty, naughty.”
Then, a few days later, they unloaded another piece of heavy equipment without proper notification, authorities said.
“We have the police and the military,” Hammeken-Holm warned. “They can assist in dealing with unlawful activities if necessary.”
McIllree admitted, “We kind of fell down.” He said the company apologized to Greenlandic officials.
The potentially oil-rich area, known as Jameson Land, is a highly protected environmental zone, an Arctic swampland of sorts, home to tenacious shrubs and musk ox, foxes and migrating birds like the pink-footed goose. The musk ox is prized for its meat and its fur, which is turned into a luxurious yarn.
All this has attracted Dr. Phil, who did a recent 44-minute podcast on the project. He titled the episode “Frozen Gold,” and according to documents on Greenland Energy’s website, the company has established “a wide-ranging partnership” with him to make a six-episode series on “this modern-day treasure hunt.”
His company did not respond to requests for comment about his involvement in the project. But on his podcast, Dr. Phil said he would soon head to the Arctic.
“I’m going to have to mug a kitten and get some mittens because I’m going to go up there and see this firsthand,” he said.
Ittoqqortoormiit (It-tok-kor-TOR-meet), population 329, is trying to make sense of what’s happening. This spring, members of the local council seemed ready to negotiate and drafted a list of things they wanted from the oil company: a heated community pool, new hunting cabins, and funding for residents to fly over Jameson Land in helicopters one last time before their hunting grounds were turned into an industrial site.
But the public meeting in June changed the mood.
McIllree conceded that the team that led the meeting didn’t show enough respect.
“They forgot whose house they were in,” he said.
Still, some residents support the project.
Aage Uugi Pike Barselajsen, a construction worker, said in a telephone interview that Ittoqqortoormiit desperately needed jobs.
“You have to think about the future and the money,” he explained. “Maybe Greenland could become like Dubai. That’s my dream.”
This article originally appeared in he New York Times.
