Bunkering market of Big Port St. Petersburg is stable and the number of oil spills is decreasing. This segment is facing the creation of infrastructure for LNG bunkering and development of new terminals. Harbour Master’s Service of the port tells IAA PortNews about the situation in the bunkering market of Saint-Petersburg.

New Customs Code of EAEU came into effect on 1 January 2018 to replace the Customs Code of the Customs Union. When speaking at the XIV International Transport Forum “Yug-Transshipment-2018”, Sergey Sokolov, Adviser for Customs Formalities and Customs Control, Department of Customs Legislation and Law Enforcement Practice, told about changes streamlining customs procedures.

Russian shipbuilding and shipping industries are going through very interesting times: on the one hand, they should integrate more closely with the Eurasian space and follow the global technological trends; on the other hand they have to escape dependence on foreign manufacturers.

In the first quarter of 2018, Black Sea container terminals of Romania, Ukraine, Russia, Georgia and Bulgaria handled 732,948 TEUs including empty containers and excluding transshipment.

Olga Sarkova, Director General of OOO Industrial Safety Systems, tells IAA PortNews about practical application of new requirements on oil spill response plans (OSR plans) which came into effect on 7 November 2017 for oil transshipment and bunkering operations.

Shipyards of Russia are not equally loaded so far. Considerable number of potential orders will let ensure a well balanced loading. State leasing companies representing an important instrument to finance newbuildings provide for construction of almost all commercial ships.

RF Navy’s Northern Fleet has successfully completed ice tests of the newest icebreaker Ilya Muromets. It took 19 days for the ship to perform the test ptogramme in the water areas of the Barents and Kara seas, in ice fields of different thickness and density.

After a long period of stagnation Russia has at last embarked on wide-scale construction of civil vessels. However, the process of fleet renovation can be hindered by low content of serial construction and imbalance between different types of transport.

Russia, along with Qatar, Australia and the USA, will be among the world’s largest suppliers of LNG. However, its competitiveness should be improved through logistics optimization while LNG as bunker fuel can be quite expensive due to dependence on foreign technologies and equipment.

Seaport of Novorossiysk, Russia’s leader in terms of throughput, is set to boost its capacity in the nearest future and to enter the pool of major container players in the Black Sea along with Ukraine’s Odessa and Romania’s Constanta. A significant factor that still limits the development is the infrastructure bottlenecks on railway and highway approaches to the port.