Around us more than 2,000 workers are toiling under floodlights on one of the largest and coldest building sites in the world, a vast new gas terminal deep inside the Arctic Circle that will soon begin shipping liquefied energy to the US and Europe.

Welcome to Hammerfest, Norway, the northernmost town in the world and the frontier of a new “black gold rush” in the Arctic, prompted in part by global warming.

Climate is changing the world’s economy as well as the environment, and the thawing of the polar ice is opening up the Arctic as never before, creating shipping routes and fishing grounds, promising tourism opportunities and, most lucratively, the exploitation of new oil and gas fields. Prospectors are pouring into the Arctic, and Hammerfest, once a tiny settlement on the outermost rim of the habitable world, has become the new Klondike.

At weekends, after a week of 12-hour shifts, men from 60 nations pour into the bars that are springing up along the sea front. They get drunk, play cards and sing about home. Then the fights start. “There just aren’t enough girls to go around,” Sverre, of the Norwegian company Statoil, said.

This is Paint Your Wagon, Arctic-style, at minus 15C (5F). The men have come from all over the world to seek their fortunes in what was once a frozen wasteland, and there is a fortune to be made.

Work on Snow White, the liquefied natural gas processing plant on the edge of Hammerfest, began in 2002. Since then, gas pipes have been laid running 140km (87 miles) out to the Snow White gas field, 30,000 lorryloads of concrete have been poured into a looming grey edifice, two million metres of cables have been laid, and nearly three million cubic metres of rock blasted to form a breakwater against the freezing ocean.

Today the Snow White terminal rises, floodlit in the afternoon winter darkness, like some ghostly set of a James Bond film, a man-made compound in which workers scurry about, surrounded by ice cliffs and barbed wire.

Next year the gas will start to flow, and so will the money. “We estimate the Snow White project will earn 400 billion Kroner (£34 billion), and the reservoir is expected to last at least 30 years,” Sverre said.

But if the scientists are right, the burning of this fossil fuel will add to greenhouse gases, the world will warm more, the ice will become thinner and smaller, and the prospectors will be able to push ever farther north in search of energy.

Norwegian environmentalists have bitterly opposed the oil-and-gas exploration, saying that the drilling in the Barents Sea puts at risk a vital and fragile ecosystem. Protests caused the Norwegian Government to halt oil exploration in 2001, but the ban has been lifted in most areas.

Put simply, the receding ice makes it far easier to find, drill and extract oil and gas. The Arctic Ocean is thought to contain at least a quarter of the world’s undiscovered reserves.

Given the volatile complexity of oil politics in the Middle East, Norway offers a stable alternative supplier. “There is not going to be a revolution in Norway,” Sverre said. “We are too relaxed.” The Canadian Government has opened up areas for exploration, and scientists have found evidence of oil reservoirs 320km from the North Pole.

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