(Adnkronos) – A Chinese company is preparing to sail a cargo ship along Russia’s northern coast to Europe. Politico writes this, emphasizing that it is a test, made possible by the acceleration of climate change and the melting of ice, which aims to establish a lasting trade route that drastically cuts time and geopolitical risks to trade.
Specifically, it will be the container ship Istanbul Bridge, 25 years old and flying the Liberian flag, starting next September 20th to undertake the 18-day journey from the port of Ningbo-Zhoushan, the largest in the world, to that of Felixstowe in the United Kingdom, accompanied by an escort of icebreakers. “The goal is not an isolated voyage, which has already been done before, but to establish a regular service through Russia’s Northern Sea Route connecting multiple ports in Asia and Europe,” the newspaper writes.
“The big picture is that the Arctic is opening up. Twenty years ago it was frozen. But now that it’s melting and something is opening up, there’s interest,” Malte Humpert, senior fellow and founder of the Arctic Institute, a Washington-based think tank that studies Arctic security, told Politico. According to the expert, such a route is not only 40% shorter than traditional routes, which pass through the Suez Canal, the Mediterranean and Singapore: the Arctic presents “much much less geopolitical uncertainty… so it could potentially become an alternative trade route”.
Peter Sand, chief analyst at shipping consultancy Xeneta, reminded the European newspaper that the idea of an Arctic route is not new at all. What’s new is that this Chinese container ship’s voyage doesn’t just involve one port of origin and one port of arrival. “They are trying four ports in China, then through the Arctic, then UK, Rotterdam, Hamburg and Gdansk. This actually looks like a normal shipping route,” he said. However, the scale is very small: such a route “is perhaps equivalent to 1% of trade between the Far East and Northern Europe,” he explains. In this perspective, the Arctic route only makes sense when global demand is high, and the extra capacity and shorter transit times offset the higher freight rates.
So the Arctic route, even if open, will not upset the balance of trade routes as they are set up today, “but in the next decade it could be one of those niche services that appear during peak season,” says Sand. In the long term, however, the benefits could be immense, as Humpert explains to Politico. “From the Suez Canal it has about 10,000 ships every year”, much more than the very small scale of a possible Arctic route, where the danger due to ice varies intensely with the progress of the seasons, but “30 or 40 years in the future”, with the ice further shrinking “by 30, 40, 50%, suddenly you have six months without ice, and the Arctic becomes a very interesting equation”.
The operation is not without environmental impact. The Arctic region is warming three to four times faster than the rest of the planet, and marine fuel emissions are five times more harmful if released near snow or ice, as Andrew Dumbrille, a consultant to the Clean Arctic Alliance, explains to Politico. Not to mention that the Istanbul Bridge will likely use heavy fuel oil along the route, an extremely polluting fuel if released into the water and banned by the International Maritime Organization in July 2024, although loopholes remain for its use.
