"Boris, do you really think you can reverse the flow of the giant rivers that flow to the Arctic?"And the headline story from High North News via Arctic Today, June 10:
"Da"
[didn't happen, lot of planning, little action]
"Boris, are you really going to create reservoirs with nuclear explosions?"
"Da"
[happened*]
The barges are planned to be positioned off Murmansk and Kamchatka, where gas from Yamal fields can be reloaded for shipment on to markets
Novatek, Russia’s largest private natural gas company, took another step toward optimizing its transport logistics along the Northern Sea Route, signing a deal with South Korea’s Daewoo Shipbuilding and Marine Engineering for the construction of two massive LNG storage barges totaling $748 million.
Delivery is expected in 2022. Novatek had first announced plans for a transshipment hub in 2017.
The floating LNG storage units will serve as permanent transshipment facilities located near Murmansk and off the Kamchatka peninsula at the western and eastern termini of the NSR.
LNG barges are floating LNG terminals which receive and store natural gas before transferring it onwards to another vessel. The units will be the world’s largest floating LNG storage holding 360,000 cubic meters of LNG, several times larger than existing units. Each barge will cost just over $374 million and the contract contains an option for two additional barges.
Final step in logistics puzzle
The barges will allow Novatek to significantly reduce its transport costs. The two new barges thus represent a crucial final step in optimizing Novatek’s export logistics from the Arctic to Europe.
The floating LNG storage units will be used as transshipment hubs at both ends of the NSR. Novatek and its shipping partners use highly specialized ice-capable Arc7 vessels to transport LNG from the point of production on the Yamal peninsula in the Russian Arctic to Europe or Asia. Ideally, the company will restrict the use of Arc7 vessels to the icy parts of the voyage before transferring the LNG to conventional LNG carriers which are cheaper to build and run more efficiently.
Currently, the Arc7 ships either travel the full distance or alternatively Novatek uses ad-hoc and temporary ship-to-ship transfer of LNG. For that purpose the company has partnered with Norwegian shipping company Tschudi in 2018, 2019, and 2020 to transfer up to 15 million tons of LNG near Honningsvåg off Norway’s northern coast. The company and Norway faced substantial criticism from the United States for cooperating with Russia.
A
map shows Yamal and Arctic LNG II sites and transport routes to Europe
and Asia with new transshipment hubs.
(Malte Humpert / High North News)
....MORE
*From Knowledge Stew:
....The USSR’s PNE Program
The USSR conducted 124 PNEs from 1965 to 1989. Their program was called Peaceful Nuclear Explosions for the National Economy and was also known as Project 7. The first PNE was conducted by the USSR in 1965 and was also the largest PNE by either country.The site was at the Chagan nuclear test site in Kazakhstan and was 140 kilotons. By comparison, the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima was 15 kilotons. The Soviets wanted to know if it was possible to create an artificial reservoir using a PNE. They placed the nuclear device deep in the ground under a dry portion of the Chagan River, and the blast made a crater 100 meters deep (328 feet) and 400 meters across (1,312 feet). The lip height of the newly formed crated was between 20 and 38 meters (65 to 124 feet). Some nuclear material was detected over Japan, and since the test happened before the Peaceful Nuclear Explosions Treaty, the United States questioned whether the USSR had violated the Limited Test Ban Treaty of 1963.The crater became a lake because of a channel that had been carved to the area before the test had taken place, but the radioactive levels of the water in the newly formed lake were found to be almost 100 times that of standard water levels more than 25 years later. That is why the reservoir has sometimes been dubbed, the “Atomic Lake.”....MUCH MORE
