Economists at the University of Calgary are investigating ways to identify Russian oil tankers falsely reporting their locations in the Arctic.
Commercial ships often have an identification system onboard, known as an automatic identification system (AIS). This allows them to be tracked as they traverse the world's oceans.
Dr. Lucija Muehlenbachs, PhD, a professor of economics in the Faculty of Arts, and Ajornie Taylor, a PhD student in economics, say there are increasing reports that ships transporting Russian oil are finding ways to manipulate their AIS, in order to bypass sanctions imposed on Russian following their invasion of Ukraine in 2022.
"A ship may actually be loading at a Russian Arctic energy terminal, while its AIS signal makes it appear to be hundreds of miles away in the Norwegian Sea to evade detection for transporting Russian oil," explains Taylor.
Lucija Muehlenbachs (right) and Ajornie Taylor are using ship location data to track Russian oil tankers that may be evading sanctions. Photo Courtesy: Lucija Muehlenbachs
The importance of the Arctic
The practice of manipulating a ship's signal is known as spoofing, and Taylor and Muehlenbachs are working to identify these spoofers and see how they are evading detection in the Arctic.
The Arctic has become critically important in the movement of oil tankers, as Taylor says the number of tankers in the region increased by 396 per cent from 2013 to 2025.
"When it comes to ships trying to evade sanction while transporting Russian oil, we see them using the Arctic routes more than before. We want to identify these actors in the Arctic and see how these sanctions affect their behaviours," says Taylor.
Taylor says they are also looking into ways to predict when a ship may manipulate its signal before it starts to do so. To do this, he is looking at the AIS data and developing algorithms to identify common shipping lanes and patterns before they start manipulating their signals.
"If we can identify that, then we can have some probability of whether or not a ship is likely to spoof in the next few hours, which can be very beneficial to the Coast Guards and other marine regulatory bodies."
One of Russia's major revenue generators oil exports have been under sanctions by G7 countries, the European Union and their partners since 2022. The original sanction package came in two forms. The first was an embargo that prohibited most seaborne imports of Russian crude oil into the EU and the second was a price cap of US$60 per barrel.
The economists say Russia developed a fleet of ships that allows them to still transport their oil, sell it at a cost above that $60 per barrel and evade detection when they do so. These ships are sailing to India, China, Turkey and other Asian markets.
"We think it's important to monitor what's happening in the Arctic, and we want to have a good way to detect this manipulation," says Muehlenbachs. "We can test our algorithm for detection because we can see whether tankers that are subject to the sanctions are behaving differently than other ships."
The two researchers are developing this algorithm through funding from a Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council grant, and they have also applied for an Alberta Innovates grant to make the algorithm a more marketable technology.
"Eventually, we want to be able to forecast this illicit behaviour, and exploiting insights from economics may allow us to do this well," says Muehlenbachs.
