A commercial future in the Northwest Passage
We need to slowly explore what is actually possible to do here CHRISTIAN BONFILS
The company that made the first commercial transit of the Northwest Passage plans to increase its shipments through the legendary waterway next year, suggesting such traffic is coming sooner than anyone anticipated.
“We hope and expect to do it,” said Christian Bonfils of Nordic Bulk Carriers, the Danish shipper that owns the Nordic Orion.
The vessel made history last September when it hauled 15,000 tonnes of coal to Finland from Vancouver through waters that were once impenetrable ice. It took four days less than it would have taken to traverse the Panama Canal, and its greater depths allowed the Orion to carry about 25 per cent more coal.
Sailing through the passage saved the company about $200,000 and resulted in a nicely profitable voyage.
“We had a very smooth voyage and not any major delays,” said Bonfils. “We’re very pleased about it.”
The company is talking with the Canadian government about ramping up those shipments, Bonfils said. The number of planned transits is under discussion.
“It’s a bit too early to say,” said Bonfils from Copenhagen. “The window for doing this changes every year. We need to slowly explore what is actually possible to do here.”
A federal spokesman confirmed the company has broached its plans for multiple transits with the government.
“Nordic Bulk Carriers representatives have met with Canadian Coast Guard and Transport Canada representatives to dis- cuss anticipated transits in 2014 through the Northwest Passage,” said Kevin Hill of the Department of Fisheries and Oceans, which is responsible for the Coast Guard.
Those discussions have included possible icebreaker assistance, Hill said.
That means an era that many experts relegated to the future is already here, said Rob Huebert, an Arctic policy expert at the University of Calgary. “The game is afoot,” he said. He suggested previous surveys reporting almost no interest in the Northwest Passage were simply the result of shippers holding their cards close to their vests.
“When you look at the number of icestrengthened vessels that came out of the woodwork for (Russia’s) Northern Sea Route, it’s obvious that some companies have been quickly building up capacity. It’s obvious now the companies aren’t being forthright in terms of what their capabilities are.”
In Russia, 421 vessels applied for permission to use that country’s northern passage last season.
Now that Nordic Bulk Carriers has shown it’s possible — and is acting on that information with more crossings — other shippers are likely to follow suit, said John Higginbotham, a professor at Ottawa’s Carleton University and former assistant deputy minister of transport. “I expect more com- panies to take advantage of it,” he said. “I think there’s some Canadian companies that got scooped. I believe they only woke up to this development.”
He said the ice in the Passage varies in extent from year to year, but the old, tough, multi-year ice that once blocked the route is largely gone.
“It is thinner and more rotten and (has) less volume than ever before,” he said.
However, one commercial transit does not a Suez Canal make. That waterway gets 18,000 ships a year. Since 1903, Coast Guard records show only four tankers have made full transits of the Northwest Passage, including one each in 2011 and 2012. No cargo ship has made the voyage and the Nordic Orion is the only bulk carrier to have done so.
The Northwest Passage lacks adequate nautical charts, ports, search-and-rescue stations and icebreakers available to commercial ships. Unlike in Russia, the federal government has not made upgrading those facilities a priority.
But Bonfils said his company is convinced there’s money to be made in sending goods through a waterway that once bedevilled generations of mariners.
“It’s a good addition to what we do because we have the ships already,” he said. “We don’t expect a boom in ice-class bulk carriers being built because all of a sudden you can sail the Northwest Passage. This is more of an addition (instead of) a stand-alone business.”
Expect more shippers to reach the same conclusion, Higginbotham said.
“Where there’s cargo to make money, ships will go.”