RLL Container Report - 07 September 2016
From: John Keir, Ross Learmont Ltd. Email: john.keir@telia.com Date: 07 September 2016
I will lift up mine eyes.
At a recent meeting in Irkutsk, representatives from China, Kazakhstan and Russia discussed potential transport corridors. Not for them talk of East-West routes via the expanded Suez or Panama Canal. Rather, the intermodal experts had fixed their gaze on the North and the West and proposed that their respective governments should concentrate efforts on developing a route via China, Kazakhstan and Russia that led directly to the ice-free port of Murmansk. From the port in North-West Russia, containers could move directly to North-East America, thus reducing the transit time for export goods from Western and Central China to markets in the USA and Canada.
At first glance, one might conclude that the delegates had all been over-dosing on Russia’s finest vodkas. Admittedly, Murmansk is at the end of the broad-gauge railway and the port is ice-free but where would the container vessels
call? Coincidentally, their colleagues in Canada have been mulling over the same question. They have concluded that Canada and USA need a large, modern container terminal capable of handling the biggest container vessels of 18,000
or more. Two potential sites are being promoted in the North-Eastern Canadian province of Nova Scotia. The proposed ports are the nearest landfall in continental North America to Europe and both are connected to the Canadian and US rail networks, an essential consideration for a port complex of this size.
Of course, these two projects sound similar to the other madcap scheme to construct a super-container terminal at the old navy base at Scapa Flow in the Orkney Isles. If you plot out the shortest route between Murmansk and the proposed ports at Nova Scotia, you arrive at the Orkney Isles and the deep-water port at Scapa Flow. Perhaps, those good folks meeting in Irkutsk are on to something big.
This approach may seem suggest to some that planners are taking leave of their senses by promoting ports, which are way off the main trade routes. Others might argue with equal validity that containerisation is moving into a new phase,
in which many traditional bulk commodities will start to move in boxes transported on even larger container vessels. Just take a fraction of the grain, timber, paper and bulk chemical market that currently moves by bulk vessels and start moving these by containers. The potential volumes are massive and the specific targeted cargoes are to be found in Northern Russia, Canada and the US of A.
But, you may say, that is all very well but what will be Scapa Flow’s contribution to this rise in global containerized cargo transport? Apart from improving the fish catch from the North Sea and the Atlantic, we’ll just have to increase the production of the Amber Nectar from the nearby whisky distilleries.
John Keir, Ross Learmont Ltd.
07 September 2016
Copyright ©, 2016, John Keir