It’s only about the oil and gas deposits well within U.S. jurisdiction, and it concerns the extremely high costs of discovery drilling in the Arctic and the Federal sale of the mineral leases versus whether or not sufficient profit can be earned when they have already had one extremely dry hole in the formation that was supposed to be so promising. Shell has already been trimming costs to weather the collapse of oil prices, so this very expensive dry well does nothing to inspire confidence in earning any money developing the field at this point in time and the bad world economy.
In other words, of the multi-well program, they drilled the last well first. Bummer. I’ve been on a couple of those.