Northern Sea Route Saves Only Half as Much Time for Ships to Travel Between China and Europe as Moscow Claims, Russian Captain Says

Paul Goble

            Staunton, Aug. 7 – One of the reasons so many people around the world look to the Northern Sea Route as a replacement for the Suez Canal is that Moscow routinely claims that the travel time of ships travelling between China and Europe is 20 days less than that of vessels going via the Suez Canal.

            But that isn’t true, Vadim Alekseyev, a retired Russian sea captain says, pointing out that because ships using the NSR operate at slower speeds, the actual saving in time is ten days rather than the 20 the Moscow media claim and that many others accept as plausible and even true given the shorter distances involved (svpressa.ru/business/article/526509/).

            Because of ice conditions and safety requirements, he says, “the average travel speeds on the NSR are lower [than those on the routes through the Suez Canal], about 15 knots versus 20 on the southern routes.” That means that savings in time and fuel “turn out to be less significant” than many think.

            But that is only one reason that the NSR still carries only a tiny percentage of the cargo that passes through Suez, Alekseyev continues. Even with global warming, “unrestricted navigation for standard, that is, non-ice-class vessels is currently possible for only three to four months a year.

            Icebreakers can extend this season but only at much higher costs. And one should not forget, “there are vessel requirements: large capacity contain ships optimized for the Suez Canal are unsuitable for the NSR,” something that “limits the pool of potential participants” via the Arctic route.

            Russia’s existing and planned icebreakers can handle projected cargo volumes on the NSR through 2030, Alekseyev says; but “However, if the NSR begins to attract significant numbers of foreign transit vessels, the strain on icebreakers will increase many times over.”

            But there is an even larger “bottleneck,” he indicates, on the development of the NSR: the state of Russian ports. They lack the capacity to handle significantly larger cargo loads than they do now, not having sufficient docks, repair facilities, dredging operations, and worst of all rail and road links from them to other transportation networks.