China Market Insider New Shipping Route Through the Arctic Halves the Transit Time of Containers

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Asia Waypoint

Wuxi InfiMotion Technology Co., Ltd.

China has opened the "Northern Sea Route" through the Arctic, where container ships now take only about half as long to reach Europe as before.

Henrik Bork is Managing Director at Asia Waypoint, a consulting agency specializing in China and based in Beijing. 

The "Istanbul Bridge" left the port of Ningbo-Zhoushan on September 23. It is scheduled to dock in Felixstowe, England's largest container port, 18 days later. The new route is made possible by the dramatic melting of ice in the Arctic, which many experts attribute to climate change.

Twenty years ago, “everything up there on the globe was still frozen,” quotes the Politico-owned environmental portal E&E News, Malte Humpert, the founder of the “Arctic Institute” in Washington. Until recently, the earliest references to the first container routes were around 2040 or 2050. Now the ice is disappearing much faster than previously assumed. In the Arctic, the Earth's surface is warming five times faster than elsewhere, according to some data. “Now that it’s melting and something is opening up, there is interest,” says Humpert.

Due to warmer waters, a five-month window per year has already opened, making it possible to navigate the Northern Sea Route (NSR). This is what makes the establishment of regular shipping routes possible.

The ship is currently sailing from the East China Sea, first past Japan and then through the Bering Strait into the Arctic. From there, it passes through the Chukchi Sea, the East Siberian Sea, and the Laptev Sea to the famous Kara Gate, the strait between Novaya Zemlya and Vaygach Island. From there, it continues through the Barents Sea north of Murmansk and Norway, then past the Lofoten Islands into the North Atlantic and the North Sea. In addition to the English port of Felixstowe, the ship will also call at Rotterdam, Hamburg, and Gdansk. The journey from East China to England takes 18 days.

That is almost exactly the route that the Swedish polar explorer Adolf Erik Nordenskiöld took in 1878 during his first successful navigation of the "Northeast Passage"—just in the opposite direction. The Swede sailed with his steamship "Vega" from Gothenburg via northern Norway and the Kara Gate, then continued along the Siberian coast. In the Chukchi Sea, he had to overwinter in the pack ice before reaching the Bering Strait and the Pacific in 1879.

First Regular Shipping Route

Since then, countless other adventurers and captains have dreamed of this passage. The start of the "Arctic Express China-Europe" is hailed as a "historic event" by the Chinese newspaper Global Times, only slightly exaggerating in the process.

It is not the first attempt of this kind. However, by calling at many ports in England, Holland, Germany, and Poland, as well as several ports in China, the Chinese shipping company Sea Legend is establishing something like a regular shipping route through the Arctic for the first time. Previously, there had only been experiments between two individual ports on this route.

The time saved compared to traditional shipping routes is immense. Through the Suez Canal, container ships from China take approximately 40 days, provided they are not disrupted by pirates. On the safer route around the Cape of Good Hope, it even takes 50 days.

Even the freight trains between China and Europe still take around 25 days, about a week longer. Recently, there have also been disruptions due to the war in Ukraine. Just a few days ago, Poland closed its border crossings to Belarus. 130 freight trains from China to Europe were left stranded.

The Istanbul Bridge is loaded with 4,900 containers carrying, among other things, solar panels, batteries, and Christmas gifts valued at around 199 million US dollars, being transported through the icy northern seas for distribution under Europe's Christmas trees.

This is particularly interesting for many retailers during the Christmas season, as the ship will be unloaded in Europe several weeks earlier than most other freighters, which usually depart China at the end of September or beginning of October.

All these ships only arrive in early to mid-November, all at once, and this often leads to congestion and waiting times of up to two weeks off Rotterdam or Hamburg before the goods can be unloaded. The Istanbul Bridge, coming through the Arctic, arrives when the ports are still empty.

Since a large part of the route is controlled by Russia, the Chinese need not fear competition from Western shipping companies for the time being. Accordingly, the first reactions there were rather sour. “We look at what the Chinese are doing with skepticism,” quotes T-Online from a spokesperson for the German shipping company Hapag-Lloyd. They are continuing to rely on planning security instead of speed—and on slower sailing to save CO₂.

Other experts criticize the condition of the 557 feet long Istanbul Bridge, whose hull is not reinforced like that of an icebreaker, or point to "geopolitical risks." However, they do not mention the Somali pirates who board ships south of the Gulf of Aden, the politically motivated attacks by Houthi militias from Yemen in the Bab al-Mandab Strait near Djibouti, or the Iranian Revolutionary Guards.

Chinese voices, in contrast to these skeptical opinions, emphasize almost exclusively the advantages of the new route through the Arctic. The region through which his ship is currently traveling is "politically and economically stable, reducing risks such as piracy, congestion, and the spillover of conflicts," quotes the Global Times from Li Xiaobin, the COO of Sea Legend. Additionally, the shorter transit time could save up to 30 percent in CO₂ emissions, making the Arctic route a "green alternative" in global logistics, according to Li.

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