SIBUR planning to send test shipment to China via Northern Sea Route

YEKATERINBURG. June 13 (Interfax) - SIBUR plans to start test shipments of loaded containers along the Northern Sea Route through October, Vadim Stepchenko, head of the territorial center for branded transport services of the Sverdlovsk Railway (part of Russian Railways), said on Tuesday during the Logistics and Foreign Economic Activity in the New Coordinate System conference in Yekaterinburg.

"Colleagues, primarily shippers, are interested, and they are very actively looking for new transport corridors, and one of them is the Northern Sea Route. Moreover, SIBUR is interested. With the participation of Russian Railways, the first container train traveled along the Northern Sea Route with a call-overload in Salekhard, then through the Gulf of Ob, and went towards a Chinese port," Stepchenko said.

He clarified to Interfax that this shipment of goods is planned as a test. As a result of the experiment, the terms, cost and conditions under which it is possible to carry out regular container transportation along the NSR will be made clear.

"Russian Railways is participating in terms of the shipment on land, and then further, using sea vessels (...) to China," he said.

Stepchenko added that there are companies interested in transportation along the NSR, but at the same time, they want to use a "ready-made service."

"SIBUR can generate this volume of cargo, and it is clear to them from the standpoint of transportation. They have products for year-round transport without any special requirements in terms of weather conditions," Stepchenko explained.

The railway station closest to Salekhard, Obskaya, belongs to the Northern Railway and is located in the city of Labytnangi on the opposite bank of the Ob River from Salekhard.

As reported, a 525 km long railway was built from the Obskaya station to Gazprom's Bovanenkovskoye field. The issue of building a railway line with a length of about 170 km from Bovanenkovo to Sabetta (Northern latitudinal way - 2) is under discussion, which would connect the port of Sabetta with the railway network. "There are (...) 170 km left, and Russia will have another Arctic port with a railway. In fact, this will be our easternmost port in the Arctic. We are also working on this project so that when all the necessary conditions appear, we can implement it," the Governor of the YaNAD Dmitry Artyukhov said at a meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin in April of this year.

Sabetta is an arctic port near the village of the same name in Yamal, located on the coast of the Ob Bay, which is part of the Kara Sea. Yamal LNG built a plant for the production of liquefied natural gas here on the resource base of the South Tambeyskoye field and exports hydrocarbons from the Arctic to the east along the Northern Sea Route.

There is an international airport of the same name in Sabetta, it corresponds to ICAO category I and can receive almost all types of aircraft.