Go North Young Man: "Kazakhstan Looks To The Arctic For A New Trade Route"

From High North News:

Kazakhstan aims to use the vast Ob’-Irtysh river system to gain access the world’s oceans via the Arctic port of Sabetta. Russian President Putin and Kazakh President Nazarbayev are scheduled to discuss the project this Fall in Omsk

The landlocked central-Asian country is furthering its efforts to develop new transport routes by utilizing Russia’s largest river system. Kazakhstan hopes to benefit from the rapid growth of Arctic shipping and piggyback along these newly developing trade routes. However, it must tread carefully as both Russia and China have vested interests in the region, including the latter’s Belt and Road Initiative.

Access via the Arctic

Kazakhstan’s existing infrastructure and trade routes are oriented in an east-west fashion connecting the country to Europe and Asia via land. With Russia developing Sabetta at the mouth of the Ob’ into a large-scale port, Kazakhstan now hopes to add a much-needed north-south dimension to its trade routes and utilize inland waterways to overcome the hurdle of not having direct access to the world’s oceans. The feasibility of this type of corridor was proven in 2016 when two large petrochemical reactors, each weighing in at over 500 tons, were delivered from South Korea via the Northern Sea Route and along 2,000 kilometers of the Ob’-Irtysh to Pavlodar.

Since 2016 Sabetta has developed into the largest port along the Northern Sea Route, with cargo volume growing more than five-fold to 17.4 million tons last year. In addition to a vast terminal to export up to 18 million tons of liquefied natural gas (LNG) per year from the South Tambeyskoye natural gas field, the port is adding multimodal containerized cargo capacity. A railroad connecting the harbor to Bovanenkovo to the southwest is also in the final planning stages.

“Initially, the seaport was meant as a dedicated gas off-loading port. But now, it has effectively become Ural’s gate to the sea,” explains the head of the Ural’s Customs Directorate Vyacheslav Goloskov. “It will open a completely new page in the history of the whole logistics of the Urals."

Importance of Russia’s Rivers

The Ob’-Irtysh is the world’s seventh-longest river and the westernmost of the three great Siberian rivers that discharge into the Arctic Ocean. The river is navigable for ocean-going vessels for more than 1,200 kilometers and navigable by cargo barges for thousands of kilometers more. In 2018 more than six million tons of cargo and around one million people were transported along the river.

Russia’s Siberian rivers have long been central to carrying goods for those living along their banks. In total more than 18 million tons of cargo and five million people are transported annually. “There is no alternative to the Amur, Yenisei, Lena and Ob river routes. The lives of people settled by the rivers' banks totally depends on them,” explains Nikolai Patrushev, secretary of the Security Council of Russia....

The Ob’-Irtysh river system and the Northern Sea Route. (Source: Author’s own work)

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