The World in 2050_ Four Forces Shaping Civilization's Northern Future - Laurence C. Smith [85]
With less sea ice, this diverse maritime activity will intensify. It will operate longer and penetrate deeper. It will become more economic to use boats to take food and heavy equipment north, and bring raw natural resources south to waiting markets. Mines located near a coast or an inland river will become increasingly viable. Already, South Korean shipbuilders, like Samsung Heavy Industries, are developing polar LNG carriers specially designed to work there. When those vast new offshore gas deposits are eventually developed, these ships will cruise right up to the wellheads. They will gorge on liquefied natural gas, then turn around and carry it to anywhere in the world.
Ten “Ports of the Future” Poised to Benefit from Increased Traffic in the Arctic
Shipping is the world’s cheapest form of transport. As its penetration grows and intensifies, we will see a growing maritime economy in the Arctic. On the opposite page is my qualified guess at ten ports that bear particularly close watching in the coming years. Other possible sleepers include Tuktoyaktuk, Iqaluit, and Bathurst Inlet in Canada; Nome in Alaska; Ilulissat in Greenland; and Varandey, Naryan-Mar, and Tiksi in Russia.
When the Amundsen docked in Churchill, I knew exactly what to do. While everyone else was milling around, saying farewells or asking for directions to the town’s famous Portuguese bakery, I dashed straight to the train station to ask if the tracks were OK. Just as I’d feared, they weren’t. I went immediately to the airport and scooped up one of the last seats on a flight to Winnipeg. I felt guilty because I had beaten out my former friends and comrades, who I knew could be stranded a week or more. But I had just been to Churchill six weeks before, and I knew they would enjoy themselves.
Churchill is famous for being the polar bear capital of the world—thousands of tourists descend on the town each October to watch them from heated buses out on the snowy tundra—but the place is even more incredible in summer. The snow is gone, the weather warm, and some three thousand white beluga whales move into the bay to feast on capelin and have babies. You can see the belugas distantly from the shore, but for eighty dollars a Zodiac tour will take you right out to them. The boil of white bodies leaping all around me, many with little gray calves hugging their backs, is one of the most spectacular sights I’ve ever seen in my life.
Churchill’s other industry is shipping. It is the only northern deepwater seaport in Canada. It is also the closest port to her western provinces, where most of the country’s agriculture takes place. Wheat, durum, barley, rapeseed, feed peas, and flax from the prairies are loaded into train cars and sent to Winnipeg, where a spur line runs north for a thousand miles to Churchill on the shore of Hudson Bay. But despite its geographic advantage the port has never done very well. In 1997 the port, grain elevator, and 810 miles of railroad were bought for a pittance from the Canadian government by Denver-based OmniTRAX Inc., one of the biggest privately held railroad companies in North America. As part of the deal the company poured some USD $50 million in repairs and upgrades to its facilities and rail line.
When I first visited Churchill ten years after OmniTRAX took over, the port still wasn’t running at full capacity. Its general manager and Churchill’s mayor both offered that the reason was at least partially political.372 There was also a lingering perception that the Churchill facility could not handle steel hoppers (the industry standard) even after the necessary upgrades had been made. But the biggest problem of all was the rail line linking the port to Winnipeg. Even after millions of dollars in improvements, it was still unreliable. Allowable speeds were slow, and the tracks had to be closed