Wadan to win icebreakers

Norilsk Nickel, Russia’s largest mining company, is close to ordering two high-value icebreaking tankers and a large icebreaker at Germany’s struggling Wadan Yards. The deal, worth an estimated EUR 350m ($461m), is being lined up by Wadan Yard’s Russian shareholder and is in addition to four ro-ro-/passenger newbuildings costing roughly EUR 1bn in total.

There has been plenty of talk recently about Wadan Yards benefitting from Russia’s FLC West having acquired 70% of the company, which also includes a yard in the Ukraine, from what was at the time Aker Yards.

Russia’s huge oil and gas reserves inside the Arctic Circle could generate vast numbers of orders for icebreaking and ice-strengthened oil and gas tonnage in future and Wadan Yards is an obvious choice. Significantly, Germany’s new federal minister of economics and technology, Dr Karl-Theodor Freiherr zu Guttenberg, was visiting Moscow and expected to discuss the Norilsk Nickel orders.

Talks for the two tankers and icebreaker are claimed to be in the final stages. A meeting involving FLC West was held last week and technical details still have to be discussed. The size of the tankers has not been disclosed but the ships will use modified hulls from a series of icebreaker container/cargoships of 170 metres by 23 metres recently built for Norilsk Nickel.

Five of those diesel-electric newbuildings, equipped with Azipod propulsion units, are capable of breaking through 1.5m of thick Arctic ice, moving stern first at up to three knots. The first was commissioned in 2006 and the last, the Nadezhda, in January.

Wadan Yards was responsible for four and Aker Yards in Finland, whose Aker Arctic Technology research and development arm is based in Helsinki, for one.

Germany is desperately in need of new shipbuilding contracts after the cancellation at various yards last year of 29 orders and another 11 so far this year, together worth EUR 1.5bn ($2m). Wadan Yards, which has two facilities in Wismar and Warnemunde, was close to bankruptcy before securing largely government-backed loans involving also KfW Ipex and Deutsche Bank, as well as a bridging loan from the German state of Mecklenburg-Vorpommern.

FLC West director general Andrzej Burlakov disclosed recently that four passenger ships would be built by Wadan Yards, each costing around EUR 250m.

These involve a pair of ropaxes, also equipped for railway usage, that would trade between St Petersburg and Kaliningrad and two non-rail ropaxes for operation on the St Petersburg-Hamburg route.

South Korea’s STX Shipbuilding, which still owns 30% of Wadan Yards, has decades of icebreaker-building expertise at its disposal through its acquisition of Aker Yards’s Finnish facilities. Burlakov has also raised the prospect of a drilling rig for Russian energy major Gazprom, which could be produced in co-operation between Wadan Yards and a Russian yard. The contract value is estimated at $700m.

Wadan Yards spokesman Matthias Trott said: “We urgently need new orders.” Its orderbook of 12 vessels takes it only to the third quarter of 2010, although Trott says the yard is also working with potential customers outside Russia.