Rosatom sets new vector for Hydrographic Company
Aleksey Likhachev, General Director of the State Atomic Energy Corporation "Rosatom" has arrived in Saint-Petersburg for a face-to-face meeting with the team of FSUE Hydrographic Company (Federal State Unitary Hydrographic Department). Apart from reviewing the company’s operational results and plans for a period until 2025, the personnel will meet the new General Director, Aleksandr Bengert, who has been with Rosatom for a long period of time, as Yury Mikhov steps down.
Last year Hydrographic Company managed to achieve high results in navigational and hydrographic support of shipping on the Northern Sea Route (NSR). Considerable expansion of the scope of works in the NSR waters has been planned for 2021 as well as heavy upgrade of the company’s ice-class ships and construction of new ones.
According to Rosatom’s press release “Hydrographic Company currently undertakes new projects on the Northern Sea Route allowing to make a new step towards realization of the NSR potential and significant expansion of transport capacity, thus raising the efficiency of the Arctic projects and facilitating the strategic social & economic development of Russia’s Arctic regions”.
In his interview with IAA PortNews, Yury Mikhov has recently commented:
- FSUE Hydrographic Company has been providing navigational and hydrographic support of shipping in the Northern Sea Route waters for about 90 years already. The recent five years were very interesting and rich in significant events for me as the leader of the company. Together with our team we passed through an organizationally challenging period when HC was handed over from Rosmorrechflot to Rosatom on 1 April 2019. The most important thing for us was to preserve the entire team of professional hydrographers and fully meet the standard and the new tasks set for Hydrographic Company.
We continued conducting hydrographic works for the NSR mapping while ensuring the planned scope of surveys and uninterrupted operation of GLONASS/GPS stations in the Arctic. For the first time we acted as a customer of dredging at the Utrenny terminal with the works successfully accomplished in the terminal’s water area after its responsibility was assigned to Hydrographic Company. We took over port infrastructure facilities from FSUE Rosmorport and started taking port dues in Sabetta, Dudinka and Pevek from August 2019.
Let me elaborate on some projects.
Having been entrusted with a function of developing and maintaining the NSR infrastructure we pay special attention to the facilities in the Gulf of Ob. On the basis of economic control rights the company is in charge of port infrastructure in Sabetta, particularly the port’s sea channel and the access canal, water areas of the cargo handling and auxiliary berths, ice protection facilities. Due to high sediment accumulation at the access canal and in the water area of Sabetta, maintenance dredging required there exceeds 1 million cbm per year. In 2020, we performed excavation works within a short period of time.
Under construction are the new federal facilities for the Utrenny LNG and stable gas condensate terminal in the Gulf of Ob: the access canal, the water area and the navigation facilities.
Besides, a decision was taken in 2020 to perform reconstruction of Sea Channel in Sabetta for ensuring safe operation of large ships round the year. The complete scope of work under the project’s first phase was fulfilled that year by our contractors with a total amount of dredged material having exceeded 32 million cbm. The works on Sea Channel will be continued in 2021.
Aids to navigation in the Gulf of Ob were handed over from Rosmorport to Hydrographic Company almost two years age. There are over 80 of them. Their operation is a prerequisite of safety in the Arctic. Our specialists have arranged a round-the-clock control of aids to navigation at the access canal and in the water area of Sabetta port as well as in other sections of the Northern Sea Route. We ensure operation of almost 300 aids to navigation along the Northern Sea Route.
Our key priority is the bottom configuration survey: terrain survey in the Bering Strait and in the Sannikov Strait as well as revision survey at limiting sections, especially in the moths of the Yenisey and Kolyma rivers. A total of 46,500 virtual kilometers were surveys in 2020.
To summarize the two-year performance of Hydrographic Company under Rosatom I would like to emphasize proudly that the unique enterprise has been preserved, new functions have been mastered and news tasks are met in full.
New infrastructure projects in the Arctic will be discussed on 10-11 March 2021 in Moscow, at the 4th International Congress “Hydraulic Engineering Structures and Dredging”. The event is organized by Russia’s leading maritime media group PortNews with the support of Rosatom and the Federal Marine and River Transport Agency (Rosmorrechflot). General Partner of the Congress - FSUE Rosmorport.
More about the Congress Programme and terms of participation >>>>.
By Nadezhda Malysheva
mn@portnews.ru
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