While Russia is developing projects on natural gas liquefaction, the world starts creating infrastructure for production, storage and transportation of hydrogen. Yet, experts forecast the gas era to last long enough. Moreover, leading gas exporters can start importing Russian LNG.

Russia has set itself a challenging task of ensuring domestic production of ship equipment since the dependence on products of foreign origin means the loss of added value. Perhaps, the most crucial segment is the one manufacturing ship engines, a heart of any self-propelled ship.

Passenger transportation by high-speed ships was very popular in soviet years. The only disadvantage was high cost of such transportation compared to that of land transport, twice as much or even three times in some cases. Unattractive price was among the factors behind gradual deterioration of the high-speed transportation segment. The other one was the fleet wear and obsolescence due to absence of modernization.

Construction of new civil ships was the main topic of the business programme at the NEVA 2021 exhibition held recently in Saint-Petersburg. The key task is to build ice class ships and ships of inland navigation with production arranged mostly in Russia and high content of locally manufactured equipment.

The second phase of providing investment quotas known as ‘keel quotas’ is being prepared in Russia. It is to cover the construction of 30 fishing ships of various types. Meanwhile, Rosrybolovstvo (Russian Federal Fisheries Agency) is against imposing any standard designs of ships hoping for development of domestic designs. Providing of the new fleet with repair facilities is a separate problem.

The Far East development is associated with exports to the booming economies of the Asia-Pacific Region and with transit. Meanwhile, a lot is to be done to ensure sustainable logistics: construction of icebreakers and ships of other types, modernization of sea terminals, expansion of the railway capacity.

New chapter in the history of China-Russia cooperation in smart shipping and autonomous navigation

In 2021, Turkey’s Kuzey Star Shipyard secured several large state contracts including the construction of two LNG-powered icebreakers for Rosmorport and a floating dock for Rosatom. The shipyard is not a new player in the Russian market. KSS is about to deliver two dual-fuel ferries to Rosmorport and it has been providing ship repair services to Russia’s largest ship owners for a long lime. Ersoy Solmaz, Business Development & Commercial Director, answers the questions of IAA PortNews.

Sergey Lukyanenko, head of Leader Consult Recruiting, shares his opinion on personnel issues in logistics as part of partnership under Translogistics Saint-Petersburg conference.

The pandemic has severely affected the global seaborne shipping market and has ‘driven crazy’ the freight rates: contrasted with zero or even negative rates in the segment of oil tankers, container ships’ freight rates hit records and break the traditional logistics schemes while the cost of dry bulk cargo transportation reaches its decade high.