Bukhta Sever, the Arctic oil terminal built for Rosneft’s massive Vostok Oil project, has sent out its first export cargo. Or is about to.

The shuttle tanker Valentin Pikul spent 84 days waiting beside the port’s only loading berth. Now full, it is preparing to head for China along the Northern Sea Route. A sister ship, the Akademik Gubkin, is on its way to the terminal.

The two 120,000-ton tankers were built in sections in South Korea to Samsung’s AST69K design. The sections were then shipped to the Zvezda yard in Russia’s Far East and welded together.

Rosneft says it will need at least 40 tankers to carry oil from Bukhta Sever, plus more than 10 support vessels, some of them ice-class. Most of this fleet exists only on paper.

The loading ceremony for the Valentin Pikul followed a familiar script. Rosneft CEO Igor Sechin reported another triumph to President Vladimir Putin, and the numbers grew more impressive as he spoke. Sechin even called the tankers Arc7 vessels, despite shipping registers identifying them as Arc6.

That was the modest part of the performance.

An astonishing 30 million tons

Sechin promised that Vostok Oil would ship about 30 million metric tons of crude during the second half of 2027. Later, if the market cooperates, output could rise to 100 million tons a year.

Thirty million tons in six months works out at roughly 164,000 tons a day. Bukhta Sever would have to load the equivalent of about two Aframax tankers every day, without a break.

Rosneft does not have the ships, and they cannot simply be hired elsewhere because there is no large reserve of ice-capable tankers waiting for work on the world market.

Then there is the route itself. Shipping through the eastern part of the Northern Sea Route is possible for only a few months each year, with heavy icebreaker support. Keeping two tankers a day moving through those waters........

© The Moscow Times