An environmental and techno-economic analysis of transporting LNG via Arctic route

Abstract

The Northern Sea Route (NSR) might be a promising route for LNG transportation from the LNG plants in Russia’s Yamal Peninsula to Northeast Asia countries with significant savings in sailing distance and time compared to traditional Suez Canal Route (SCR). However, surging transportation activities along NSR might harm the environment with the greenhouse gas (GHG) and atmospheric pollutant emissions. Little research has been done to investigate the environmental and techno-economic potential of transporting LNG via NSR. Furthermore, this paper analyses the relevance of an Arc4 ice-class vessel, not currently used for this route. This paper targets to address the question that how much GHGs and atmospheric pollutants does a carrier emit and how is the feasibility of different fuel types for the summer and winter transportation considering environmental impacts. An environmental and techno-economic model quantifying the emissions and total costs have been developed and 3 scenarios of using different fuel types (HFO, MDO, LNG) are proposed to investigate the environmental and economic performances in summer and winter respectively. Our results reveal that the unit cost of transporting LNG via NSR is around 90 U.S. $ cents/GJ in summer and 120 $ cents/GJ in winter considering environmental cost. The findings also show that in the short run when regardless of environmental cost, HFO is still the preferable option for ships by its competitive cost. While when considering the environmental cost, LNG has better economic and environmental performance than other fuel types. So, for the long run, LNG might be encouraged to be the main fuel used in Arctic.