Major shipping catch-up needed to keep up with the big boys
POLAR routes are increasingly important in global shipping. This was epitomised last year when the cruise ship Crystal Serenity sailed from Anchorage, Alaska, called at a tiny village, Ulukhaktok, where her 1 000 passengers disembarked in small groups to avoid swamping the local populace of 400 souls.
After another two calls at wild Arctic outposts, the ship continued through the north-west passage to New York.
Whether global warming or simply climatological cycles allow this to happen is open for discussion, but both the north-west and north-east passages are witnessing significant growth in shipping.
This has prompted the Russians to build a state-of-the-art nuclear ice breaker to augment their ice breaking capacity for the north-east passage, and no doubt, the Canadians are also beefing up their ice breaking fleet to meet the demand for passages along that country’s Arctic coastline.
The discovery of an enormous gas field on the Yamal Peninsula in the Russian Arctic brought special measures to export the gas (LNG), mainly to China which has invested heavily in the project.
Before the benefits of the estimated annual production of about 16.5 million metric tons from this gas field could be exploited, a new port, Sabetta, and infrastructure had to be built.
A friend forwarded to me photographs of these new facilities, ranging from the LNG terminal itself to a new international airport. Remarkable is the fact that everything built there had to be moved in by sea, generating a veritable stream of ice-strengthened heavylift ships carrying enormous modules for the LNG facilities at Sabetta.
Equally remarkable is that construction work is nearly finished, is on time and within budget despite the vagaries of the Arctic weather and Western sanctions against Russia which many thought would delay or even stop the project. Although the Russians will not be averse to selling the LNG to any buyer,
China will be the main importer of gas from this field, and a fleet of specially-equipped ice-strengthened LNG carriers is currently under construction in the Daewoo shipyard in Korea. Indeed, this project presents a bonanza for those operators of gassers who have gone into partnership to move the LNG.
The idea is to move the LNG from the gas field to China via the northeast passage during the northern hemisphere’s summer. In winter when the ice becomes too thick even for these vessels to get through, the gas will go to Zeebrugge in Belgium, where it will be trans-shipped into conventional gassers for onward shipment to China via Suez.
The first custom-built gasser for the trade is presently in the Arctic undergoing ice trials, while a further four are in various stages of completion in Korea. A fleet of 11 specialised LNG carriers will participate in the service to move gas to Yamal.
I boarded one of these ships while in Korea a fortnight ago. The vessel, that is three rugby fields long, oozes technology. Contrary to my erroneous belief that azipods protruding from the hull cannot operate in ice, these ships have three huge azipods that, in fact, present the ship with an advanced ice-breaking capability.
Her ice-breaker bow will cope with relatively thin ice as the weight of the ship breaks ice. For ice up to about 2.1m thick, the ship is turned, using her azipods that then break the ice, literally carving a passage through the ice.
Despite adversity, the Yamal project came to fruition because of strong political will. Imagine how South African shipping would benefit if real political will became evident in local projects such as the construction of large dry docks in Cape Town and/or Saldanha Bay.