MOSCOW, November 7. /TASS/. The Norilsk Nickel Company (Nornickel) plans to increase cargo shipment along the Northern Sea Route from 1.6 million tons to 3 million tons per year by 2028-2030, the company's First Vice President Nikolay Utkin said at the Creating the Future symposium.

The Northern Sea Route (NSR) is a shipping route in the Russian Arctic that runs along Russia's northern shores in seas of the Arctic Ocean (the Barents, Kara, Laptev, East Siberian, Chukchi and Bering Seas). It connects the Russian Federation's European and Far Eastern ports as well as the mouths of navigable Siberian rivers into a single transport system. NSR's length from the Kara Gate Strait to the Providence Bay is 5,600 km.

"We confidently associate the Arctic's development with a bigger traffic along the Northern Sea Route. We plan to increase the current 1.6 million tons that we ship along the Northern Sea Route to 3 million tons. We plan to reach these figures in 2028-2030, based on current conditions," he said.

Norilsk Nickel's fleet has six ice-class vessels. The company has invested more than 1 billion rubles ($10 million) in its upgrade. Nornickel's subsidiary, the Yenisei River Shipping Company, is the main cargo carrier on the Yenisei River. The company owns port facilities in Dudinka, the Krasnoyarsk Region's north, to serve both sea and river class vessels. Nornickel plans to invest in development of transport infrastructures in the areas of its presence.

The Creating the Future symposium ran in Moscow on November 4-6. It was the first event at the Rossiya National Center, organized in compliance with an order by President Vladimir Putin to preserve the heritage of the International Russia EXPO at Moscow's VDNKh Exhibition Center. TASS was the symposium's information partner.