Arctic shipping under global change: A case study of offshore oil exports

• The Northern Sea Route becomes competitive with the Suez Route as sea-ice thins, especially in the fastest-warming scenario. • Favorability changes when also weighing emissions costs along the Suez route with the ice-related costs of the Arctic route. • Linking human-Earth systems modeling with the analysis of Arctic shipping makes our paper internally-consistent and unique. We explore impacts of sea ice thinning and evolutions in the energy sector on future use of the Northern Sea Route (NSR) versus the Suez Canal Route (SCR), using a case study of shipping oil extracted from the offshore Russian Arctic to China. We combine an integrated human-Earth system model with a shipping cost model to incorporate impacts on both oil production and shipping costs under internally consistent scenarios. We find that the NSR could become cost-competitive with the SCR as sea ice thickness declines, especially in an RCP8.5 scenario, due to decreasing fuel and icebreaker escort costs. In a global energy evolution scenario consistent with RCP2.6, high emissions costs on the longer SCR may outweigh the costs associated with thicker sea ice on the NSR. Our novel framework provides integrated projections of NSR shipping traffic and associated emissions driven by potential Arctic offshore oil production and exports.