Strong embeddings of minimum genus

A “folklore conjecture, probably due to Tutte” (as described in [P.D. Seymour, Sums of circuits, in: Graph Theory and Related Topics (Proc. Conf., Univ. Waterloo, 1977), Academic Press, 1979, pp. 341–355]) asserts that every bridgeless cubic graph can be embedded on a surface of its own genus in such a way that the face boundaries are cycles of the graph. Sporadic counterexamples to this conjecture have been known since the late 1970s. In this paper we consider closed 2-cell embeddings of graphs and show that certain (cubic) graphs (of any fixed genus) have closed 2-cell embedding only in surfaces whose genus is very large (proportional to the order of these graphs), thus providing a plethora of strong counterexamples to the above conjecture. The main result yielding such counterexamples may be of independent interest.