MOSCOW, March 29. /TASS/. Interconnecting freight traffic along the Northern Sea Route (NSR) with trunk transport thoroughfares inside Russia will enable boosting cargo traffic along the NSR to 250-270 mln metric tons by the mid-2030s, Alexey Likhachev, CEO of Russian state nuclear power corporation Rosatom, said.
"Transportation all over the Arctic is critical within the NSR framework. Still, it is important to interconnect it with all of the western ports, Kaliningrad, Murmansk, St. Petersburg, and with all of the eastern ports. The second stage will be linking it to internal transport thoroughfares, first of all to operating and developing railroad routes. According to our estimates, the NSR cargo turnover may reach 250-270 mln metric tons of freight once this transport ecosystem is up and running," the senior executive noted.
Such capacity is comparable with the throughput of the Eastern Range railroad, plans for which call for expanding to 270 mln metric tons annually by that time, Likhachev noted. "Therefore, we will obtain one more operating artery, connecting not merely transit flows but all of the domestic goods flows of Russia. I would like to stress also that the development and operation of this transport thoroughfare is lower in terms of cost than similar rail traffic parameters," he added.