The rapidly melting Arctic ice is now gradually opening up for summer sailing both through the Northeast and Northwest Passages. The Beluga company intends take the chance and sail without icebreaker assistance through the Northeast Passage already next summer, newspaper Dagens Næringsliv reports.
As a matter of fact, the German company wanted to send a ship along the route already this year, but did not manage to get the necessary approval from Russian authorities in time. Company director Niels Stolberg now says to newspaper TradeWinds that “we will try to use economically attractive sea route in the middle of 2009”.
Shipping along the Northern Sea Route will cut sailing distances from Bremen, Germany, to Shanghai with as much as 3200 nautical miles.
Risky business
The shipping operation will however be far from safe. Despite the thinner Arctic ice layers, the ships could get stuck in ice, and assistance from Russian rescuers might be both unreliable and far away.
Similarly risky is the environmental consequences of an oil spill in the area. A wrecked tanker in a far away spot could pose a major hazard to the vulnerable Arctic environment.
Barents Rescue
Over the last few years, shipping in the Barents Sea has surged following the development of Russian export terminals along the country’s northern coast. The Arctic shipping operations will in the years to come only continue to increase as industrial activities pick pace and the Arctic ice vanishes.
The challenges following the Arctic shipping will be the focus of next year’s “Barents Rescue” rehearsal. The “Barents Rescue – 2009” will be organised by Russian authorities in the oil export terminal of Varandey, a key port for shipping of Russian oil from the resource-rich Timan-Pechora province. Together with colleagues from Norway, Finland, Sweden, as well as the USA and Canada, the organisers of the event will focus on the scenario of a wrecked tanker threatening the environment of the Nenets Autonomous Okrug.
The rehearsal will be held in highly authentic environments. The port of Varandey, the Lukoil controlled export terminal which opened this year, will itself be one of the possible threats to the Arctic environment. The terminal, located 23 km off the coast of the Nenets AO, will be connected land-based facilities with a pipeline. Terminal capacity is 12 million tons of oil per year.
The oil will all be shipped by ice-protected tankers to storage facilities in Murmansk, from where it subsequently is shipped to foreign recipients.
The Barents Rescue 2009 is organised by Russian authorities as part of the country’s chairmanship period in the Barents Euro-Arctic Council. Read more about the council at Beac.st
