Media MEDIA CLIPPING
Canadian Transportation & Logistics
April 30, 2010
Cold Comfort
-Leo Ryan
Icebergs and growlers, dense fog and freezing temperatures. Meet the Canadian shipping company that calls the Northwest Passage home
Of the Canadian companies involved in commercial shipping in the Arctic, Fednav is widely recognized as the pioneer of conquering the ice-infested waters, delivering supplies to remote communities and shipping mine products to faraway markets for more than five decades.
Based in Montreal, Fednav has been owned by the Pathy family of Hungarian-origin since its creation. From a fledgling enterprise launched in Toronto in 1944, the Fednav Group has become a force to be reckoned with in world bulk shipping.
Today it operates a fleet of some 70 owned or chartered vessels serving the Great Lakes/St. Lawrence, Atlantic, Pacific and Arctic trades. Nearly 30 of the ships are ice-class. These include those which were involved in the awesome Baffinland project (see p.12).
But two ships in the Fednav fleet stand out because they are in the Polar class and are able to navigate year-round in a region posing formidable challenges to transportation. These are the 28,000-DWT Arctic, the world's first ice-breaking bulk carrier, and the newer Umiak 1, the most powerful vessel of its kind, built by a Japanese shipyard and delivered to Fednav in 2006. Both are Canadian-flag.
"We are the only Canadian company that operates in the Arctic Shipping Pollution Prevention Control Zone in the winter," notes Tom Paterson, Fednav's vice-president of owned fleet and business development.
Since mining production began in the late 1970s in the Canadian Arctic, Fednav has carried most of the ore concentrates exported from the region.
The Arctic transports some 150,000 tonnes a year of nickel concentrates from the Raglan Mine, located about 100 km south of Deception Bay in Nunavik. The mine, owned and operated by Xstrata Nickel, is located in sub-Arctic permafrost.
The 31,500-DWT Umiak 1 was custom-designed to move 360,000 tonnes of nickel a year in 12 voyages from Inco's Voisey Bay mine in northern Labrador to smelters in Manitoba and Ontario. The cargo is unloaded at the Port of Quebec from where it is shipped by rail to final destination.
The Umiak's 30,000 hp main engine allows the vessel to break first year winter ice of 1.5 metre thickness at a continuous forward speed of three knots. The Arctic's engine possesses roughly half the horsepower of the Umiak.
"It's all to do with power in the wintertime," says Paterson. "Northeast winds, for example, are lethal for the Labrador Sea. One has to design a ship to knife through the shear zone between the mobile pack ice and the landfast ice."
"The shear zone requires the ship to back off and ram," he continued. "And in this connection, the stern thrust of the Umiak is equivalent to 90% of its head (forward) thrust. With the Arctic, it's only 50%."
Paterson indicated that Fednav annually ships some two million tonnes of concentrates from Voisey's Bay, Raglan, and the large Red Dog zinc mine in northwestern Alaska. Fednav also delivers about 100,000 tonnes of fuel and other products into the Arctic mining communities.
Last year marked a milestone in Fednav's relationship with Teck Alaska, previously known as Teck Cominco Alaska. Since the Red Dog mine 20 years ago, more than 20 million tonnes of zinc and lead concentrates have been shipped to world markets.
Looking at unexploited opportunities in other areas, Paterson sees tremendous potential in the central Arctic region around Izok Lake, 350 kilometres north of Yellowknife, where big gold, zinc and copper deposits have been discovered. It would involve, among other things, hundred of millions of dollars in investments in an all-weather road connecting with a deepsea port to be built at Bathurst Inlet.
Asked to comment on reports suggesting that global warming will extend shipping in the Northwest Passage considerably beyond the traditional summer/fall window in the not-too-distant future, Paterson candidly stated: "The prospect of the Northwest Passage becoming the next Panama Canal (connecting the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans) is not going to happen in my lifetime, and I am not that old!"
In his view, "The Passage is a destination -- it is not a transit route that makes business sense. There has never been a commercial transit from east to west or west to east carrying cargo."
Moreover, Paterson affirms, "There is no such thing as completely ice-free waters," alluding to a recent report estimating that the Arctic could be ice-free in the summer in about three years. He stresses there is always the unpredictable presence of ice-berg bits and growlers (a low-lying mass of floe ice not easily seen by approaching vessels owing to its dark indigo colour).
Paterson feels that those who have pointed to the much shorter distance of several thousand nautical miles between Europe and Asia by using the Northwest Passage instead of transiting the Panama Canal have neglected to take the real time savings into account. "When you work out the actual steaming time, the slow steaming all the way up Davis Strait, Baffin Bay through Lancaster Sound, you are certainly not going to be barreling up in a dense fog at 20 knots on a containership with no ice class."
The risks of damage are significant, he said, before pointing to potentially astronomical insurance premiums and costly repairs at yards situated great distances away.
"It boils down to experience," Paterson concluded. "Even if the Passage is (technically) open, the downside risk is very high."
