The route from Russia’s Yamal LNG plant to a Chinese storage facility, GoRadar graphic

The little-noticed tankers off AK’s coast

One line in the middle of qCapitan’s latest report on Russian Arctic shipping ought to send a chill down the spines of Alaskans.

“In addition to liquefied natural gas, Russia is expected to send dozens of shipments of crude oil via the Arctic,” the maritime trade publication reported at midmonth.

Once this Russian crude moved east to Europe or began a journey through the Barents Sea and the Atlantic Ocean on the long route from the Russian North to Asia.

But all of this began to change after Europe and the U.S. elected to boycott Russian goods and natural resources to protest its invasion of Ukraine and, hopefully, limit its financial ability to wage war.

Russia has since forged ever closer ties to China, and Russian President Vladimir Putin seems even more intent on pursuing his dream of going down in history as the political leader who broke open the North Sea Route of which Russia has long dreamed.

Goods of all sorts – including that crude oil – are now flowing west from Russia to the Bering Strait before turning south into the Bering Sea.

In February, Putin promised a year-round Northern Sea Route and offered an invitation to assist any countries that wanted to use it for faster shipping to Asia.

Big Dreams

“We are inviting foreign logistics companies [and] countries to actively use the capabilities of this global transport corridor. Thirty-six million tonnes of cargo was carried on it last year. Colleagues, that is five times the record of the Soviet Union,” he declared in a global communique.

“We will ensure all-year navigation on the Northern Sea Route, [and] we will increase the turnover of our northern ports, including the Murmansk transport hub. And of course, we will increase the [size of the] Arctic fleet. The unique research icebreaker platform Severny Polyus went out last year. The keel of the new nuclear-powered icebreaker Leningrad was laid down at the Baltic shipyard at the beginning of this year, and we will lay down the keel of another ship of this class, the Stalingrad, next year.

‘The new generation icebreaker Lider, which has twice as much capacity, is being built at the Zvezda Far Eastern shipyard. We are planning to considerably modernize the trade fleet, tankers, gas carriers and container carriers at our domestic shipyards. This will enable Russian businesses to build effective flows in a situation involving changing logistics [and] fundamental changes in the global economy.”

The U.S.-Europe boycott of Russian natural resources and goods appears to be costing Moscow a small fortune, but it has also helped to boost the Northern Sea Route to Asia.

Reuters in June reported India was importing record volumes of Russian oil. Meeting in Kazakhstan earlier this month, Putin and Chinese leader Xi Jinping “hailed their countries’ deepening alignment” as CNN put it. 

Russia’s Northern Sea Route plays directly into Russia’s coupling with the world’s two most-populated nations.

As qCaptain reported, the “Northern Sea Route provides for significant distance savings to Asia, especially compared to the ongoing detour via the Cape of Good Hope due to instability in the Red Sea. Voyages from Northern Europe to East Asia via the southern tip of Africa take at least six weeks (42 days), compared to 18 days or so via the Arctic.”

Arctic voyages have been known to take longer than that because of delays caused by ice, but the latest shipment of LNG from the Yamal LNG plant in the Arctic to Xiuyu, China, is reported to have taken only hours longer than two and a half weeks.

That’s less than half the time of shipping around the Cape of Good Hope and, if everything goes well, days shorter than the route the Suez Canal as well.

The problem in the Arctic is that things don’t always go well. It is one of the most inhospitable climates on earth where, as the adventuring Archdeacon Hudson Stuck observed more than 100 years ago in quoting the “old timers” in-country, everything “is all right as long as it’s all right.”

Writing in “10,000 Miles with a Dogsled,” an Alaska classic published in 1914, Stuck warned that the littlest of problems can quickly become huge in the north.

The means of travel were different then and thus, too, the things that could go wrong. But Stuck’s warning about the little things still stands as it stood in 1989 when a braindead helmsman who’d steered the Exxon Valdez away from ice waited for an order to turn the ship back onto its original course.

The order never came, and the the ship famously ran aground on Bligh Reef where it gushed an estimated 11 million gallons of crude oil that smeared much of Prince William and goodly parts of the Gulf of Alaska coast north and west to the end of Kodiak Island and the Alaska Peninsula.

Alaskans learned sadly then how crude in seawater can “emulsify” to create a “mousse” that, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), can increase “the (oil) slick volume four-fold.”

They also learned how hard this oil skimmer-clogging mousse was to get out of the water.

The Exxon Valdez was a disaster in relatively protected waters free of floating ice near a major international airport and a road system that made it relatively easy to bring in materials and personnel to battle an oil spill.

The big empty

None of this exists along the American side of the Bering Sea, and the situation is little different on the Russian side. Progress is being made on the creation of a $55O million deepwater port in Nome, but there no plans for staging major oil spill response resources there.

“Communities Feel Unprepared For Potential Oil Spill At Sea,” the Nome Nugget headlined on the Fourth of July.

“June 4, 2024 the R/V Norseman II, a private research vessel owned by Support Vessels of Alaska and contracted by U.S. Fish and Wildlife Services and U.S. Geological Survey for a Pacific walrus study, became stuck in sea ice just north of Shishmaref with 14 scientists and nearly 40,000 gallons of diesel on board,” the story below reported.

For two weeks, it remained stuck in the ice with the U.S. Coast Guard unable to do much but monitor the situation.

“Every community that the Nugget spoke to in the vicinity of the Norseman II incident – Diomede, Shishmaref, Brevig Mission, and Wales – expressed serious desire for more oil spill response equipment and training,” Nugget reporter Colin Warren wrote.

“According to Kevin Knowlton, Emergency Preparedness Specialist for Kawerak, the villages, and others in the region, have not received oil spill response kits since the early 2000s, when the National Guard distributed 55-gallon drum kits meant to collect smaller spills. And many of those kits were pillaged for personal protective equipment during COVID-19.”

Forty-thousand gallons of diesel is something of a nothing burger compared to what would happen if a Russian crude carrier laden with 1 million barrels (42 million gallons) of oil was to become disabled in the ice, be pushed ashore by stormy seas and break up.

A Russian icebreaker could probably help divert disaster in such a situation, if one happened to be nearby, but U.S. capabilities to intervene are almost non-existent.

The U.S. has but two ice breakers, the heavy-duty Polar Star, which is home-ported in Seattle but spends much of its time in Antarctica, and the medium-duty Healy, also based in Seattle. 

The Polar Star was at last report somewhere off California. The Healy is reported to be in the Beaufort Sea off northern Canada, supporting a U.S. scientific expedition which is what the ship was primarily designed to do. 

The U.S. Coast Guard has been telling Congress for years that it needs more icebreakers, but Congress has been slow to respond.

“We have two icebreakers, and one is broken,” Sen. Dan Sullivan, R-Alaska, warned the House Committee on Homeland Security in April of last year.

“That’s what we have,” The Hill reported him saying. “We are building more. We are looking to purchase off the shelve some (more). But we need to make sure that we are trying to close a very, very significant icebreaker gap. Even China’s icebreaker capacity is on pace to surpass ours in 2025…and they are not even an Arctic nation.”

U.S. Coast Guard Vice Admiral Peter W. Gautier told the committee that eight to nine additional icebreakers are needed in the next 10 years. The Coast Guard now has access to $13.3 billion directed at building new icebreakers, but isn’t expecting any to be delivered until 2028 at the earliest.

The Russians have at least three dozen icebreakers in service – one of which became famous for helping the U.S. try to save whales trapped in the ice of Barrow in 1988 – and the Chinese have four.

U.S. icebreaking capabilities aren’t much better now than they were in ’88, but hopefully nothing will go wrong in the Bering Sea even if the Russians are now talking about using the Northern Sea Route to convoy non-ice-fortified tankers to Asia.

“Last summer Arctic waters saw the first use of Suezmax oil tankers, some without ice-protection raising alarm bells among environmentalists,” High North News noted last month. “These types of tankers are able to carry up to one million barrels of oil.