From Bellona.org, Jan. 30;
While some in Vladimir Putin’s government may worry that they won’t
be able to meet his goal of shipping 80 million tons of traffic via the
Arctic over the next five years – as some of them grumbled last week –
it won’t be for lack of trying.
That’s because new figures from Russia’s ports along the Northern Sea
Route show that the volume of goods being shipped out into the Arctic
waterway are up by 25 percent, according to new figures from the Russian Ministry of Transport.
This may cause some of those ministers to breath a sigh of relief,
but the booming business along the Northern Sea Route – a
4,500-kilometer long stretch of sea running from Northern Siberia to the
Bering Strait – won’t be doing the environment any good.
That’s because most of the products getting shipped out of the Arctic
are carbon-intensive commodities like coal and oil. Liquefied natural
gas shipments are also up, as are other products like minerals, iron and
construction materials.
The ocean freight figures over the last year constitute a record, and
represent a flurry of activity in the Russian Arctic not seen since
Soviet times.
Ports in Murmansk alone handled some 60 million tons of cargo in 2018
– an 18.1 percent boost over volumes from the year before. Archangelsk
ports saw their volumes grow by 15 percent.
The biggest increases came in Sabetta, which sits on the icy Yamal Peninsula in the Kara Sea. With Novatek’s $27 billion Yamal LNG project
now in commercial production, Sabetta has seen a 130 percent increase
in the volume of cargo it handles – up to 17.4 tons for 2018.
But one toxic byproduct of all this activity is the soot produced by
huge freighters steaming through the Arctic sea passage, many of which
are operating on heavy fuel oil, or HFO, a carbon intensive and
polluting energy source. Exhaust from this fuel coats Arctic ice in a
blackish film, making it more vulnerable to withering solar radiation
and contributing to the overall polar melt.
The effects on the earth’s warming atmosphere are no better. One
large cargo ship or mega ocean liner can produce the same volume of
carbon emissions in one day as come from one million cars over the
course of a year.
Yet some shippers are looking to lighten the weight of their
footprint on the Arctic by switching to less damaging fuels. For
instance, Sovkomflot, Russia’s largest ocean freight operator, is
looking to power its arctic-bound fleet on liquefied natural gas. The
flagship in that line is expected to launch in 2022, and will be one of
five the shipper says it will build....MORE
