This article studies the problems of ensuring the ecological safety during the development of oil and gas deposits of Russia's Arctic shelf in modern conditions. The determination of precise land geographical boundaries of the Arctic zone of the Russian Federation (AZRF) (About, 2014) is very important. It can permit to implement special regulations of safe economic activity in Arctic. That will promote wide using of special technologies and equipment protecting environment. The creation of network of scientific stations and response centers which support monitoring and researches of environment conditions is of great importance. Today the leading oil and gas companies invest a lot of money in ensuring the ecological safety of their projects. The authors present the costs of environmental protection investments of main natural resources users during the realization of the projects on the shelf of the Russian Federation. Ecological safety becomes one of the most significant criteria during the Arctic projects development.
The first oil of Russia's Arctic shelf from the platform "Prirazlomnaya" in the Pechora Sea was shipped 18 April 2014. President Putin's approval of this project is the start of large-scale work of Russia in Arctic to extract natural resources. Accomplishment of this and similar projects has important impact on the Russian engineering industry and shipbuilding development (Infotek, 2014). In several years oil and gas companies with an arsenal of 100 licenses to research and develop offshore areas plan to pass on to large scale geological prospecting works and to start exploitation of new fields on Arctic shelf (Pavlenko, Kutsenko and Glukhareva, 2014). It is supposed that up to 290 boring wells will be drilled by 2021 according to the program of the Ministry of Natural Resources and Environment (Valentinov, 2014). It will demand the creation of new technologies of development of deep-water shelf which can minimize risk of possible ecological catastrophes. Moreover until the present time there are no sufficient researches on ecological effects of possible oil spills and other technogenic disasters on fragile and vulnerable Arctic environment (Konoplyanik, 2014). The leading oil and gas companies invest more facilities in environment protection than the whole country. Faced with the impending "hydrocarbon fever" ecological safety should be the main criteria for evaluating the Arctic projects.
