JuanP wrote:"Russia working on massive oil project to boost country's position in Arctic"
https://www.rt.com/business/507986-russ ... ct-arctic/
"Rosneft’s CEO Igor Sechin, who has met with President Vladimir Putin this week, has pledged that Vostok Oil will deliver up to 30 million tons of oil via the Northern Sea Route by 2024.
In total, the project will ensure the production, transportation and transshipment of up to 50 million tons of oil per year at the initial stage, and up to 100 million tons when the second stage is completed, Sechin said."
More than 32 million tons of goods has been shipped on the Russian Arctic shipping route in 2020.
As Russia’s vast Arctic waters freeze and ships flee the region, nuclear power company Rosatom makes public its latest Arctic shipping data.
Despite the COVID-19 and global economic downturn, shipping in the region continues to grow. According to Rosatom, the Russian state nuclear power company, the 32 million tons landmark was crossed on Dec. 22.
However, only a minor share of the volumes have been shipped along the eastern part of the route. The overwhelming part has been shipped on the western part, and first of all to the LNG terminal of Sabetta, oil terminal of Kamenny, as well as the Utrenneye construction project in Gydan Peninsula.
Symptomatically, as the new data was presented on Dec. 22, there was not a single ship sailing in the waters between the mouth of great river Yenisey and the Bering Strait, a several thousand kilometer distance.
According to Leonid Irlitsa, Deputy Head of Rosatom’s Northern Sea Route Directorate, the original target for the year was 29 million tons. A key event this year has been the opening of a new system for automatic management of maritime operations, Irlitsa explains.
The system will allow for a significant growth in transit shipments on the route in 2021, Rosatom argues.
Shipping on the Northern Sea Route has grown extensively over several years. In 2017, a total of 10,7 million tons were transported on the route. In 2018, the volume increased to 20,18 million tons and in 2019 to 31,5 million.
There is still a long way to go before President Putin’s target for Arctic shipping is reached. In his so-called May Decrees from 2018, Putin requests a total of 80 million tons on the route in 2024.
LONDON — Ships sailing through the Arctic region’s busiest lane along the Siberian coast made the highest number of trips on record this year as a quicker-than-expected melting of ice enabled more traffic, data showed.
The Arctic has warmed at least twice as quickly as the rest of the world over the last three decades and shipping activity has picked up.
Analysis by the Center for High North Logistics at Norway’s Nord University Business School showed there were 62 transits through the Northern Sea Route in the period to Dec. 9, versus 37 for the whole of 2019.
A previous year, 2013, is frequently cited as having a record 71 transits of the Northern Sea Route. But that data used a different definition, CHNL said, and included 31 voyages that did not cross the entire route from Novaya Zemlya to the Bering Strait.
“This year is considered to be the highest number of the full transit voyages,” Sergey Balmasov with CHNL told Reuters.
“We see favorable ice conditions in this navigation season as one of the reasons for the growth.”
The number of ships using the route rose to 331 vessels in the year to date, versus 277 for the whole of 2019, CHNL data showed.
The trade is driven by commodities producers — mainly in Russia, China and Canada — sending iron ore, oil, liquefied natural gas and other fuels through Arctic waters.
[IMO, Arctic states face criticism over a weak HFO ban]
The United Nations shipping agency last month approved a ban on the use of heavy fuel oil in the Arctic, but the move was criticized by green groups which said loopholes would allow many vessels to keep sailing without enough regulatory control over the region’s fragile ecosystem.
Environmentalists say HFO produces higher emissions of harmful pollutants, including sulphur oxide, nitrogen oxides, and black carbon.
“The region has seen comparatively little shipping traffic compared to other regions of the world, and the necessary environmental regulation to minimise the impact of increased shipping in the region is incomplete,” said Sian Prior, lead advisor at the Clean Arctic Alliance.
“Increased shipping will increase the risk of oil spills in the Arctic, but the remoteness and lack of infrastructure will make responding to an oil spill very challenging, if possible at all.”
CLARIFICATION: This story has been updated to clarify that 2020 saw a record number of full transits of the Northern Sea Route, with a higher figure often cited for 2013 using a different definition.
REAL Green wrote:“Sea-level rise from climate change could exceed the high-end projections, scientists warn”
https://www.fasterthanexpected.com/2020 ... ists-warn/
“A big concern of Englander’s for our future is the non-linear behavior of sea-level rise. In recent years the pace of sea-level rise has been accelerating. In the 1990s the oceans rose at about 2 millimeters per year. From 2000 to 2015 the average was 3.2 millimeters per year. But over the past few years the pace has quickened to 4.8 millimeters per year. At the current pace, we can expect at least 15 more inches of sea-level rise by the year 2100. But, as has been the case for the past few decades, the pace of sea-level rise is expected to continue to increase for the foreseeable future. So, 15 inches is not only a lower bound, it is also extremely unlikely. Adding confidence to the paper’s warning that IPCC projections for a strong warming scenario may be too low, is the evidence that sea-level rise has been running on the high end of IPCC projections for decades. Historically speaking, simple math reveals that for every degree Fahrenheit the Earth warms, sea-level eventually rises by an astonishing 24 feet. Considering that Earth has already warmed 2 degrees Fahrenheit since the late 1800s, we know that substantial sea-level rise is already baked in, regardless of whether we stop global warming. Scientists just don’t know exactly how long it will take to see the rise or how fast it will occur. But using proxy records, glaciologists can see that as we emerged from the last Ice Age, sea level rose at remarkable rates — as fast as 15 feet per century at times.”
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