Russia sets the development of the Arctic latitudes in a series of priority tasks. This region is primarily interesting from the point of view of its commercial use. After all, the Arctic subsoil and the Northern Sea Route in the future can bring considerable dividends to our country.
Inexhaustible bowels
In 2009, the journal Science published an article about research into potential reserves of the Arctic macroregion. According to published data, the ice of the Arctic hides over 10 billion tons of oil and about 1550 trillion. cubic meters of natural gas. But if oil-bearing deposits are mainly concentrated off the coast of Alaska, then almost all the reserves of Arctic gas belong to Russia.
According to the US Geological Survey, the Russian Arctic zone as a whole is the richest. In this regard, the Americans call the region of the Kara Sea especially promising, where, according to their assumption, a quarter of all undiscovered reserves of the planet lie.
In addition to hydrocarbons, the Russian Arctic subsoil is generous in rare earth metals, agrochemical ores, there are large reserves of gold, diamonds, tungsten, mercury and optical raw materials. The official representative of Rosgeology, Anton Sergeev, emphasizes that the study of the Arctic region is extremely uneven and in the near future dozens of new deposits may be discovered here.
Recently, the British newspaper Daily Star tried to calculate the projected mineral reserves of the Russian Arctic. Experts from Foggy Albion believe that this figure could reach $ 22 trillion. dollars. Russian economists put the figure at $ 30 trillion. At the same time, the cost of explored reserves is estimated at $ 2 trillion.
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Northern Sea Route
In the context of the global melting of the Arctic ice, the Russian authorities are betting on the development of the Northern Sea Route (NSR), which can become a tangible item of budget replenishment. A financial and economic model of transport lines linking Russian ports with cities in Northern Europe and Southeast Asia is already being developed.
Initially, the transportation is supposed to involve Russian cargo, which is now transported by the Trans-Siberian Railway, and then international companies will be involved in the project. According to experts, with a 75% load of container ships, the annual volume of traffic along the NSR in the near future may reach 380 thousand TEU (1TEU corresponds to a container with dimensions of 6.1 X 2.4 m.)
True, according to the developers of the financial and economic model, it will be possible to talk about profitability not earlier than 2028, when bank financing will return. In this case, the annual profit should be at least 7.5 billion rubles. By 2035, according to experts, the capitalization of the NSR feeder lines due to state investments alone will amount to about 55 billion rubles.
But will the NSR be of interest to foreign companies? Obviously yes. In September of this year, the container ship of the Danish company Maersk Line with a capacity of 3.6 thousand TEU for the first time in history changed its traditional route through the Suez Canal and passed along the Northern Sea Route. The press service for Maersk said this was done to explore the potential for container shipping in northern waters.
It became known that the Danish ship spent 26 days for the whole journey instead of the standard 34. This was predictable, since the northern route is shorter than the southern one by 7 thousand nautical miles. And although Maersk assures that they are not currently considering the NSR as a commercial alternative to the existing logistics schemes, however, domestic experts do not doubt that the Danes have already appreciated the economic benefits of the new project.
Profit is a costly thing
Before making a profit from the use of the Northern Sea Route and the development of fields in the Arctic, the state must go to substantial costs. Andrei Zagorsky, head of the department at IMEMO RAS, notes that by 2025 it was planned to invest about 260 billion rubles for specific Arctic projects, but due to budgetary difficulties, this amount will be significantly reduced.
It should also be borne in mind that logistics in the Arctic will cost 3-4 times more than on the continent. The climatic and geographical features of the region make special demands on the infrastructure being built there. Thus, according to experts, due to the impact of sea storms, port facilities will have to be moved away from the coast, which will significantly increase capital investments.
In addition, in conditions of unstable ice cover and increasing risks of icebergs formation, there is a need to build new nuclear icebreakers, without which year-round navigation is impossible. And such construction is already in full swing.
The lead nuclear icebreaker Arktika has already been launched, the costs of which are estimated at $ 625 million. By 2020, two more serial nuclear-powered ships worth $ 709 million and $ 743 million are to leave the shipyards. The total cost of the icebreaker project will cost the Treasury more than $ 2 billion.
The nuclear icebreaker "Leader" is also at the design stage, which will ensure uninterrupted year-round navigation along the NSR. The estimated cost of it will be about $ 1.2 billion, but the return is expected to be good. Such an icebreaker can increase the speed of ice-class tankers through the NSR by 5 times.
Yuri Gudoshnikov, a leading researcher at the Arctic Shelf laboratory at the Research Institute of the Arctic and Antarctic, is convinced that the Russian Arctic project is “long money”. In his opinion, it takes at least 8 years to launch the field and the prices for hydrocarbons are several times higher than now. But the Ministry of Economic Development calls not to stop, but to speed up the process of developing the Arctic, including by attracting foreign partners.
Taras Repin