MOSCOW, September 9. /TASS/. Hubs on northern rivers, planned by the national agency of maritime and river transport, Rosmorrechflot, may be organized as upgrade of existing river ports. Such hubs will favor cargo traffic on the Northern Sea Route (NSR) grow by 5.5-6 million tons by 2030, or by almost 17% against 2023, said experts and authorities interviewed by TASS.
Rosmorrechflot and Rosatom have agreed to make hubs on the Arctic and northern rivers - the Ob, the Irtysh, the Lena and the Yenisei, to involve them in cargo shipment. In response to a request from TASS, the agency said they had been organizing working groups with representatives of the regions that will be involved in the project.
"By 2030, the total additional potential cargo traffic in those river basins with further access to NSR may grow to 5.5 - 6 million tons per year (by the end of 2023, the NSR cargo traffic was 36.2 million tons)," the Arctic Development Project Office's Director General Maxim Dankin said.
The Ob-Irtysh basin only may account for an increase of up to 2 million tons due to products of the gas chemistry and mineral fertilizers sectors. The Yenisei basin - up to 1 - 1.5 million tons due to coal and forestry products' shipment. Nowadays, the key river ports in those basins are Omsk, Tobolsk, Nizhnevartovsk, Labytnangi, Novosibirsk, Tomsk, Biysk, Kemerovo, Barnaul, Dudinka, Lesosibirsk and Krasnoyarsk. "All those ports serve as meridional connections of the Russian Federation's strategically important latitudinal routes - the Trans-Siberian Railway and the Northern Sea Route," the expert told TASS.
Professor at the Lomonosov Moscow State University Sergey Nikonorov stressed the river hubs may increase NSR cargo traffic even more - by 50%. According to Rosmorrechflot, Russian river ports handle 884 million tons of cargo, although their realistic capacity is almost twice as high - 1.3 billion tons.
Infrastructure for river hubs
River hubs may be organized using existing ports on northern rivers, said Alexander Vorotnikov, Associate Professor at the Institute of Social Sciences of the Russian Presidential Academy of National Economy and Public Administration under the President of the Russian Federation (RANEPA). However, such a port should have a sufficiently big number of river-sea-class vessels to carry big amounts of cargo.
"Noteworthy, they should be vessels of different classes - tankers, container ships, refrigerated container ships, bulk cargo vessels, vessels to carry oversized cargo. In my opinion, it is also important to have other transport and production infrastructures, as well as energy and heat," the expert said.
The involved regions' authorities agree the existing infrastructures need to be used in creating river hubs. According to Yamal's energy department, the region has been facing difficulties with cargo exports to Asia-Pacific countries. The Labytnangi river port has been eyed as a potential site to accumulate and transship container cargo for further shipment along the river-sea waterway through the Gulf of Ob in the eastern direction along NSR.
Saidam Stepanov, CEO of the Arctic Trade and Logistics Company, involved in year-round shipments of socially significant food products to Yakutia's Arctic districts, noted a river hub could be organized in the village of Nizhny Bestyakh, which is located on the Lena River opposite Yakutsk. Nearby there is a railway station and federal highways Lena and Kolyma, as well as the Amga regional highway.
"By having a river hub there, we will load our ships on site - without facing the necessary storage in Yakutsk," he said. "River hubs also should be on Yakutia's Arctic rivers, where navigation is harsh in terms of time and the hydrology situation."
Social effect
In addition to infrastructures, the river hubs will favor the population growth in the Arctic, said experts interviewed by TASS. According to Vorotnikov, the growth of new jobs will be in hundreds, depending on the production growth. "At the first stage, this will keep people from leaving the region, and at the next stage, people will have to be attracted. <...> In my opinion, a good, high-quality infrastructure project always arouses interest in the population. Its implementation, participation in it, will cause population growth in the hub locations. Here, a good example is the population growth in Yamal due to Novatek's projects, or in Chukotka due to the Baimskoye field development," he said.