Almost everything you’ve heard about the melting Arctic is
wrong.
How can I possibly say that? Everything in the press of late
would indicate that the Northwest Passage (NWP) between the North Slope of
Alaska and the eastern part of the Canadian Arctic will soon be overrun with
all manner of ships, especially container ships taking advantage of the shorter
distance.
The ‘fact’ that Arctic ice is disappearing fast is so well
established that discussion has moved on to examine the lack of available
charts, whether modern hydrography can ensure the charts that do exist are even
accurate, and who really owns this prospective Arctic shortcut. The US is even
denying Canadian sovereignty and Canada is enforcing its claim by building the
world’s most expensive conventional icebreaker.
Take these examples from recent news articles:
“The future for Canadian sovereignty in the North may be
melting as fast as the Arctic ice”
- Carleton University
“...We do not know that much. Some of the charts (i.e.
maps) we have of the Northwest Passage date back to the late 1800s.”
- Dr. Huebert, University of Calgary:
“The Arctic ocean could be ice free in the summer very
soon, possibly in as little as 4 or 5 years”- David Suzuki
So the story seems to be that the Arctic is melting at a
precipitous rate and the entire place is almost wide open for shipping for the
majority of the summer. Unfortunately, the truth is slightly different.
Yes, the Arctic is melting and the ice cover continues to
shrink at a rapid rate. Yes, there is an open water passage that is wide open
due to melting of the ice cover. But awkwardly for the story it’s the Northern
Sea Route (NSR) along the northern coast of Russia that is melting first and
where the passage is open for a good deal of the summer.
On our side of the polar cap it’s a different case entirely.
Ice is melting but the period when the passage is wide open from one end to the
other is still only a couple of weeks – and not always at the same time of the
summer. (Why the length and regularity of this period is important we’ll
address a bit later.)
While the ice conditions on the NSR are by no means benign,
the North American side of the cap has a lot of nasty ice that raises the
difficulty to a much higher level. By nasty ice I mean multi year and glacial
ice. For the uninitiated, multi year ice is ice that has survived more than one
summer’s melt. Glacial ice is icebergs, the Titanic killing stuff that is shed by glaciers, the
overwhelming majority of which are produced in northwest Greenland. As ice ages
it becomes less salty and it’s structure changes. It becomes harder.
This is important because while regular Arctic ice is hard,
multi year and glacial ice is really, really hard. As an old shipmate of mine
used to say, when you are navigating in ice, the difference between hitting
first year ice and multi year ice is the difference between hitting porridge or
concrete. This hard ice drifts down from the polar cap through the Arctic
islands, or in the case of icebergs from the Melville Bight into Baffin Bay. It
causes havoc for anyone trying to take a low- or no-ice-class container ship
through the NWP. Multi year ice is disappearing, and according to some studies,
at a faster rate than first year ice, but the last place it is forecast to
disappear, of course, is the NWP.
Another issue that is mentioned is the lack of adequate
hydrography, by which I mean the surveying of the area so as to produce
suitable modern charts.
I have read several times about the dire state of charting in
the Arctic and there are certainly vast areas that are either unsurveyed or
where the survey depths are so far apart or were surveyed so long ago as to be
of little practical value. However, there is a channel that runs from Alaska
through Coronation Gulf to the eastern part of the Canadian Arctic that was
surveyed in the 1990s, using modern methods, with narrow intervals that would
indicate a safe passage for a Panamax size vessel. I know this to be true for
two reasons, first because I was involved in the project where the Canadian
Hydrographic Service in partnership with mining and shipping companies
completed the survey and second because I have pulled the charts and examined
them in detail.
Where ships frequently have problems of late is when they
stray from surveyed areas or do not have sufficient ice class to stay in the
surveyed channel when there is ice in their path. (They also get into trouble
when they try to take shortcuts.) For the American side my understanding is
that fourteen new or revised charts of the Alaska coastline will be released
this summer. So while the Arctic is certainly not well surveyed, it is not just
a white area on the charts either.
There have been frequent references in the press,
particularly in Canada, about the threat to Canadian sovereignty by the US
insisting on the right of free passage through Canadian Arctic waters. Indeed
one of the first pieces of modern Arctic antipollution legislation came about
because of the SS Manhattan voyage through the Canadian Arctic, done
without permission but with assistance from Canada. This is not a simple issue
and for that reason the press reports in attempting to simplify, or perhaps to
gather more eyeballs, report it incorrectly. As President Bush stated in 2007,
“...the United States does not question Canada’s sovereignty over its Arctic
islands.”
There is not so much an argument between Canada and the US on
this issue; it is more that they have different aims that are just not
compatible. The US wants to maintain the right of free passage through the
Arctic Archipelago, not because they think that Canada would ever try to
withhold that but because if they concede the right of free passage here it
means that other countries would attempt the same arguments elsewhere. Canada
for its part just wants to have the ability to stop substandard ships from
transiting the Arctic, which is something the US would certainly not argue with
in other circumstances. I sometimes think that mostly the diplomats just try to
avoid talking about it because they know there is not an easy solution. This of
course is an over-simplification of a complex matter, but a very readable
explanation of all of the issues is available from http://www.parl.gc.ca/content/lop/researchpublications/prb0805-e.htm.
Lastly of course there is the whole discussion about the
imminent use of the Northwest Passage by container ships, roaring through that
open water using inadequate charts. The first argument to this is entirely
empirical. I attend at least a couple of conferences each year that are devoted
to Arctic shipping and I have done this for a number of years. I have yet to
see anyone attending those conferences from a container shipping company. This
is pretty thin evidence I grant you, but if there really were an overwhelming
interest surely someone would’ve shown up?
There is other evidence as well. There is no doubt that the
route through the Northwest Passage is certainly shorter for ships going
between Europe and the Far East. Ships certainly would save fuel taking a route
through the Northwest Passage, but fuel is not the only consideration.
I gave a presentation several years ago to the Transportation
Association of Canada on just this subject. I consulted a couple of different
container shipping companies for their opinions as a peer review. They felt
that the Northwest Passage was not going to be of interest to them at least for
the next several years for a number of reasons:
Uncertainty.
Container lines function on regularity and predictability.
They have to be able to give ETAs for containers that people can rely on,
particularly for supply of industrial parts. Routing a ship through the
Northwest Passage when there’s even a chance of ice that could slow the ship or
force it to turn around and go back is just not going to happen. In the same
vein, if anything goes wrong with one of the ships while it is in the Arctic
there is virtually nowhere for it to be fixed, and the ship would likely have
to be towed out of the Arctic to a repair yard. In that case those containers
are going to be a long time getting to their final destination.
Added insurance and ice class costs.
There is a considerable saving in bunker cost for the shorter
route, particularly with the rise in cost of bunkers. However, there is also an
offsetting increase in insurance costs for breaking what is called Institute
Warranty Limits, basically for going far enough north to increase the chance of
encountering ice. Additionally the ships would likely have to carry some degree
of ice class, at least for the foreseeable future. Ice class can add 10 to 15
percent to the build cost of a typical ship. How much of the savings are
reduced by increased insurance and capital costs is an area that is being
studied. A report released by the classification society DNV thought that the
area would not be ready for container ships until after 2030 and possibly as
late as 2050.
Container ship routing.
The routing of container ships is not based on one loading
port and one discharge port per voyage. Even though the two of the largest
container terminals in the world are in Shanghai and Rotterdam there are
virtually no container ships that go directly between the two ports. Their
routing is more like a milk route, dropping off full containers and picking up.
The route for our two areas as given above is more likely to be from China to
the West Coast of the US, a couple of ports there, through the Panama Canal and
into Galveston, thence to Georgia and up to New York and finally across to
Europe. Loading a ship in Shanghai and sending it straight through to the East
Coast of the US or to Europe would require a large degree of unusual planning
to ensure there were only containers going point-to-point, which would mean
delays in storing containers and therefore extra cost.
The size of container ships.
The 10,000-TEU and 13,000-TEU ships being built today can’t
fit through the existing Panama Canal but they will through the new one, as
well as a proposed canal in Nicaragua, should it be built. The draft in parts
of the NWP is nowhere deep enough to allow the larger ships that now exist,
much less the ships being planned. It is of course possible to build wider,
shallower ships for the route but again that adds extra expense.
The Arctic ice is melting, there is no doubt. There will be
much greater access for ships in the next 20 to 30 years. But for now it’s
going to be project shipping for new mines and oil and gas developments. As for
the imminent hordes of container ships sailing freely through dangerously
unchartered waters? Not likely.
