They came, they drilled, they withdrew. In a surprise move, the oil giant Shell this week announced a halt to exploration for oil and gas under the Chukchi Sea, off the coast of Alaska.

“The decision is purely commercial,” a spokeswoman for Shell told New Scientist. Initial exploration apparently yielded too little oil to be profitable, although there was also vocal opposition to Arctic drilling, most recently from presidential candidate Hillary Clinton.

In a statement yesterday , the company said that its Burger J exploration well, sunk some 2000 metres into the seabed in July, found both oil and gas, but in amounts too meagre to warrant further exploration.

“In this case it hasn’t paid off, as there wasn’t enough there to justify the risk,” said the spokeswoman. “Shell will now cease further exploration activity in offshore Alaska for the foreseeable future.”

This despite having sunk some US$7 billion into the project, which was suspended in 2012 due to concerns over environmental damage, then resurrected this year amid strong opposition from environmental groups.

President Barack Obama may well be heaving a sigh of relief at the decision. Some had accused him of hypocrisy when he recently visited Alaska to highlight the dangers of global warming, while also endorsing Shell’s drilling there.

Big win

Environmental groups are thrilled about Shell’s withdrawal. “It’s great news for the Arctic and for the wildlife that lives there, and for our children’s health and for the climate,” says Franz Matzner, director of the Beyond Oil initiative at the Natural Resources Defense Council in Washington DC.

“In terms of keeping the Arctic pristine, it’s a big win for the environment movement,” says Malte Humpert of the Arctic Institute, a think tank based in Washington DC. “For the American Arctic, it could be the end of the story for quite a while.”

But Shell’s withdrawal from Alaska hasn’t dented its activities elsewhere the Arctic.

“We have licenses to explore in Greenland, Russia and Norway,” said the spokeswoman. “We already have an operation with the Russian firm, Gazprom, to explore in the Russian Arctic around Sakhalin Island.”

Humpert says that the Alaskan pull-out makes sense for Shell for various reasons, including the vast distances over which any oil extracted would have to be shipped to reach points of consumption, the recent slump in oil prices and the hostile environment in the Alaskan Arctic compared with other oil-rich regions in northern Russia and Scandinavia.

In Norway there’s no sea ice so they can drill all year, whereas the window in the US Arctic is only maybe two months a year, he says. And Russian and Scandinavian oilfields are much closer geographically to the markets they serve, and much of the oil isn’t even offshore. “Forty per cent of Russia’s oil and gas comes from above the Arctic Circle, much of it onshore,” says Humpert.

Matzner argues that fossil fuel prospecting in the Arctic needs to stop, and that the region should be protected. “Instead, we should be investing as much as we can to tap clean, abundant energy sources that don’t make climate change worse,” he says.