Northern Sea Route

[1][4][5] The Northern Sea Route currently serves the Arctic ports and major rivers of Siberia by importing fuel, equipment, food and exporting timber and minerals.

Currently, six major seaports are located on the NSR route in the Arctic Zone of the Russian Federation: Sabetta, Dikson, Dudinka, Khatanga, Tiksi, and Pevek ports.

For the corporate players in bulk shipping of relatively low-value raw materials, cost savings for fuel are a crucial driver to explore the Northern Sea Route for commercial transits, more than delivery time, or environmental concerns.

The Rosneft corporation often contracts the Zvezda Shipyard to build its LNG carriers,[20] for use with the output of the Trebs and Titov oil fields.

[26][27] In June 2019 Dubai-based DP World signed agreements with the Russian Direct Investment Fund, ROSATOM, and Norilsk Nickel aiming to develop the Northern Sea Route.

[28] As the Northern Sea Route is a strategically important transport artery, it can already be called economically profitable in comparison, for example, with the Suez Canal due to a number of reasons:[citation needed] As the development of the icebreaking fleet is the most important condition for constant navigation in Arctic waters, another three nuclear icebreakers of Project 22220 are currently being built in St. Petersburg: Yakutiya, Chukotka and Leningrad laid down in January 2024.

[29] All nuclear icebreakers of Project 22220 will be able to change the draft from 10.5 to 8.1 meters, depending on the depth, which will allow them to work both at sea and in the mouths of Siberian rivers.

[citation needed] In addition, the Zvezda shipyard is working on the construction of the world's most powerful nuclear icebreaker Project 10510 "Russia", scheduled to commissioning in 2027.

[30] It was reported in 2023 that Rosmorport, a state-owned agency of the Russian Ministry of Transport, has plans to run cruises for tourists in icebreakers along the entire Northern Sea Route between Murmansk and Vladivostok.

[34] For this purpose, the Directorate of the Northern Sea Route was formed, which now manages three subordinate organizations "Atomflot" (ROSATOMFLOT), "Hydrographic Enterprise" and "ChukotAtomEnergo".

Recently, the "Main Directorate of the Northern Sea Route" ("Glavsevmorput") was established on the basis of the Naval Operations Headquarters of FSUE “Atomflot”.

[39] State Corporation Rosatom assumes the possibility and functions of the NSR and ensures the safety of navigation on the high technological level.

This system will represent a digital space that will provide various services to cargo carriers, shipowners, captains, insurers, and other participants in the logistics market on the NSR.

The single digital platform will collect information from all the available sources, for example, hydrometeorological data, the location of ships and icebreakers, port congestion.

[43] The volume of cargo transported along the Northern Sea Route (NSR) in 2023 reached a historical maximum and amounted to 36.254 million tons.

The growing importance of the NSR as an additional route and source of stability in the global logistics chain may increase significantly due to the fact that more and more of the world's largest shipping companies are avoiding the Red Sea due to the situation with Houthi missile attacks [44] According to the Fourth IMO GHG Study 2020, sea cargo transportation is responsible for 2.9% of global emissions.

[47] Due to its shorter length, navigation on the NSR contributes to reducing the carbon footprint of maritime transport, although this entails considerable risks for fragile Arctic ecosystems.

[48] The project involves studies that cover all components of the environment to determine the impact of maritime traffic at all ecosystem levels by means of experimental methods, special equipment, the development of digital services, and environmental practices.

[49] Over the course of three years, representatives of leading scientific institutions from Norway, Finland, France, Iceland, Great Britain, China, India, Egypt, Malaysia, Turkey took part in the project.