Mixed fortunes for Russian yards

St Petersburg shipbuilders have abandoned any hope of being given state assistance. The hopes of winning multiple orders for large ships have not materialised either for commercial or naval ships. This is as a result of a moratorium on fleet replacement programmes.

However, the oil and gas sector is the most promising niche for local shipyards although they have neither the technical skills nor the opportunities to build large tankers. Baltiysky Shipyard built the last soviet tankers in seventies. Since then the specification for tankers has changed dramatically although the yard has built two chemical tankers for the German Transocean Ship management and three chemical river tankers are being completed for a Dutch customer.

The Krylov research institute has designed a higher-class ice tanker with 73,000t dwt specially for the Baltiysky group. Baltiysky is developing two more projects, i.e. a small floating oil processing unit and a large boom-cleaning vessel. The first has a processing capacity of between 20,000 and 100,000 tonnes of oil a year while the latter is designed to service the oil prospecting areas with the spilt oil collected and processed on board the vessel.

Many new projects are linked with the Arctic shelf and the Northern route. Admiralty Shipyards has built five 20,000 dwt tankers for Lukoil and is currently building two 47,700 dwt tankers for Sovcomflot. There is also a contract signed with a Swedish customer on building two 14,000 dwt tankers which are to be equipped with Azipod propulsors. According to the head of the Admiralty Shipyards, Vladimir Alexandrov, this is more important technically than economically and the yard is now preparing for an arctic class tanker with a displacement of 70,000 dwt.

There are plans to replace the Arctica and Taimyr type ice-breakers with ones with ?double draught? which allows them to operate in both the open seas and the estuaries of the Siberian rivers. It will increase the efficiency of northern transportations by 70 to 80% and, although the new ice-breaker has not yet been ordered, it has a code name of LK-60Ya. However, only the state could afford the $260m that such a ship would cost.

The Marketing Director of Severnaya Verf, Leonid Kuzmin, SV is to build a series of small but powerful multi-purpose diesel electric ice breakers, the first of which will be used in the Skhalin 1 and 2 projects.

Vyborg Shipyard is the only Russian shipyard specializing in building rigs for Norway and, according to the head of the marketing department, Alexei Tunimanov, the shipbuilder is going to diversify the rig sector by building all kinds of secondary and auxiliary equipment.