VARANDEY (Russia): Roads here are just tracks in snow-swept sand. Generators churn out electricity on the spot. Drinking water must be driven in from a lake near where workers are drilling for what is plentiful on this fringe of frigid Russian tundra — oil.

Temperatures can plunge to 50 degrees below zero when winter descends, but loading tankers turns truly treacherous come spring, when vicious winds smash the splintering ice sheet on the Barents Sea into a rim of coastal ice.

Even in the 1980s, when the Soviet Union was scraping by on petro cash, it didn’t bother to exploit this barren land hard up against the 69th parallel, on the harsh side of the Arctic Circle. More than 1,100 miles northeast of Moscow, it is a place whose name in the local language, Nenets, means “Land’s Edge.”

“It’s the most difficult climatic conditions I know of,” said Igor Norko, a lean-faced former government ecologist who runs the exploration operation for one of Russia’s newly independent oil companies.

But the challenging weather matters far less than political calm now, at least to the United States. The looming prospect of war against Iraq — on the volatile Persian Gulf, which ships almost a quarter of America’s imported oil — has helped propel the Bush administration on a worldwide quest for new sources of energy. And Russia, where could-be gushers such as Varandey abound, is at the center of that pursuit.

Russia has snapped out of a post-Soviet malaise in oil production, increasing output more than 20 per cent since 1998 and back toward the peak achieved by the Soviets, once the most prodigious pumpers on Earth, in the 1980s. Crucially for the United States, Russia trails only Saudi Arabia as the world’s largest exporter.

Moreover, Russia increasingly is oriented toward the West and, a decade after the fall of the Soviet Union, appears to offer stability the Middle East does not. The Persian Gulf is home to two-thirds of President Bush’s “axis of evil,” and the reliability of the region’s supplies has grown less certain since the Sept 11 attacks strained America’s relations with Arab and Muslim nations there and elsewhere.

Russia appears as eager to find new customers as the US is anxious to lessen Arab leverage. One of Russia’s largest oil companies sent test tankers of oil to the US, while another made the first Russian deposit into America’s Strategic Petroleum Reserve. In November, those companies, and two others, announced plans to spend roughly $4 billion on a new pipeline from Russia’s Siberian oil fields to Murmansk, a northern port capable of sending supertankers directly to the United States.

Not just a little oil, either, but volumes of Saudi-like proportions. Over the past 30 years, only four countries — Canada, Mexico, Saudi Arabia and Venezuela — have sustained shipments to the United States in amounts like those the pipeline is projected to carry: 1.6 million barrels a day.

That would be about 13.5 per cent of the oil the United States imported last year.

Igor Yusufov, Russia’s energy minister, said at a conference in Houston in October, “In the foreseeable future ... (Russia) will be able to become a prominent provider of energy resources to the American market.”

If that prediction is to come true, it would mark a radical departure for Russia and the United States. The Soviet oil industry was geared toward serving Cold War friends, and even now the majority of Russia’s exports go to nearby Europe, not the distant United States. Last year, Russia provided less than 1 per cent of America’s oil imports — far less than, to name one example, Iraq.

But last year’s terrorist attacks woke both the US and Russia to the possibilities. No country on Earth consumes as much oil as the US, and Russia is trying to revive its economy following a 1998 financial crisis.

Western firms have been trying to boost oil production in former Soviet republics such as Kazakhstan and Azerbaijan ever since those lands won independence a decade ago, and even now the US search is taking in potential new suppliers along the west coast of Africa. Yet Russia is an established prize, already the world’s second-largest producer of crude oil after Saudi Arabia, according to US government data.

Numbers alone do not explain Russia’s potential significance to the United States. America consumes nearly 20 million barrels a day, of which almost 12 million are imported. Even the hoped- for 1.6 million barrels a day from the Murmansk pipeline would make Russia only the third-largest foreign supplier to the United States following Canada and Saudi Arabia, according to figures published last year by the US Energy Information Administration.

But the rise of a major new US supplier from outside the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries, to which Russia does not belong, would let the United States diversify its sources of oil. It would also help hold down oil prices by increasing supply.

Varandey is one place where Russia is looking for that new oil. Right now, the two oil fields operating around Varandey produce only enough to fill a lone 20,000-ton tanker each month.

But the fields, run by an affiliate of a giant Russian firm, Lukoil, could extract twice as much next year, and in 10 years the surrounding area could produce more than 50 times the current amount, said Igor Norko, the company official.

The problem is writ huge across Russia, which is almost twice as large as any other country on Earth.

Building pipelines and ports to carry oil across Russia’s expanse, and finding new oil fields to compensate for declining production in old ones, will be major challenges in years to come.

But the Bush administration, which has close ties to the oil industry, has embraced the prospects, and in a joint statement after they met in November, Bush and Putin cited the need for investment in Russia’s oil industry.

And Voitsehovsky, who operates the pipe at Varandey and has been pumping oil out of the Russian tundra since the days when President Reagan referred to the Soviet Union as the “evil empire,” doesn’t seem worried. “Nothing has changed,” he said. “They will always need oil.”—Dawn/The Los Angeles Times News Service.