Baku, Azerbaijan (Ports Europe) January 10, 2024 – Dredging will start in the coming days in Azerbaijan’s Caspian Sea port of Baku, which will allow access to one of the terminals to vessels with a draft of more than 4 metres, Sitara Safarova, Deputy Director at Azerbaijan Maritime Engineering and Construction (AMEC), said.
“Works were planned to start at the end of 2023, but due to unfavourable weather conditions, the dredger vessel has not yet been delivered to Baku,” she said. “The operations will start in 2024”, Safarova added.
“It is increasingly difficult to dredge in the Caspian Sea ports, as the seabed used to be sand and light clay, but now it is hard clay and rocks due to the shallowing of the sea,” Rashad Shakarov, CEO of AMEC, said.
ASCO also has only one multi-dredger vessel called Muhandis Balarza Mammadov, which was built back in 1983 but has been since modernised.
Caspian Sea has been shrinking by 20-25 cm per year. This is why almost all Caspian ports can only accept vessels with a draft of about 3.5 m, while the norm is more than 6 m. The solution is to load the vessels only to 70-75% of their capacity, which affects negatively the efficiency of cargo transportation in the Caspian.
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The problem with the water level of the Caspian Sea
The Caspian Sea started shrinking in the mid-1990s and its level is projected to fall by 9-18 metres by 2100, according to a study published in December 2020 in Communications Earth & Environment journal.
If scientific projections are correct, if global warming continues or worsens and rivers’ inflow in Caspian continues to decrease, the sea’s surface area will shrink between 23%, with a 9-metre reduction, and by 34% for an 18-metre drop in water level.
The Caspian Sea started shrinking in the 1960s, but the problem ended abruptly in 1978, when its water started rising unexpectedly and without a scientific explanation for the phenomenon. This welcome development continued until the mid-1990s when the sea started losing water again. In comparison to other ancient lakes, the Caspian Sea surface temperature has suffered from the fastest rise on record.
A loss of a third of the Caspian Sea surface would deliver a fatal blow to the 12 main ports located there and trigger a financial tsunami to the economies of the region. The worst affected would be the Russian ports of Astrakhan, Makhachkala, and Olya as well as the project for a new port in Lagan (more here about the ambitious Iranian project expected to be financed by China).
Affected ports
The Caspian’s largest and most successful harbour, Baku in Azerbaijan, will also be heavily affected, as well as the country’s second port of Alat. The new Turkmenbashi (Turkmanbashi) port in Turkmenistan, a $1.5 billion (€1.32 billion) over-ambitious project for a poor and isolated state, will have difficulties in continuing operation (more about its problems here)
Aktau, Atyrau and Kuryk in Kazakhstan, as well as Amirabad, Anzali and Nowshahr in Iran, are expected to face problems and would also require huge investments to be able to continue normal operations.
According to scientific projections, the vast northern Caspian shelf, the Turkmen shelf in the southeast, and all coastal areas in the middle and southern Caspian Sea are expected to emerge from under the sea surface. In addition, the Kara-Bogaz-Gol Bay on the eastern shore will completely dry up.
Some experts caution that the Caspian Sea level could stabilise or even start rising again unexpectedly as it happened some 40 years ago. This creates a serious dilemma for the financing of ports and related multimodal land and sea transport infrastructure – whether to invest now or wait for better projections.
The sea
The Caspian Sea is the largest (371,000 to 384,400 km²) and most voluminous (78,000 to 78,700 km³) inland body of water in the world. Its physical environment and its floor have oceanic characteristics. The sea lies in an elongated depression between the European and Asian continental plates.
Its surface is well below sea level, with a maximum depth of 980 m in the south and a shallow northern half averaging just 5.2 metres. The sea extends more than 1,000 km from north to south, and is bounded by deserts in the north and east, and by grasslands and forests in the west and south.
The surface of the world’s largest (salty) lake lying between Europe and Asia has fallen by several centimetres a year since the 1990s, with the rate of water shrinkage set to increase dramatically as global temperatures continue to increase.
The Caspian’s low salinity is due to freshwater input. The Volga River contributes up to 82% of the inflow, with the rest supplied by some 130 other rivers, principally the Ural, Kura and Atrek. The withdrawal of Caspian water from the coasts where the ports are located will turn this new infrastructure into stranded assets. This issue is valid for all Caspian Sea ports
Caspian as a crossroad of transport corridors
Littoral states believe that the Caspian Sea has huge potential for them to develop a transshipment role in China’s new Silk Road, an economic strategy to seek better access for Chinese-made products in European markets.
The Caspian Sea is also a key transport link in the Trans-Caspian International Transport Route (TITR, Middle Corridor) and the promoted by Russia International North-South Transport Corridor (INSTC).
The sea occupies a key location facilitating water transport in both North-South and East-West directions. Developing international rail transport also attracts more distant countries, such as India, to use the Caspian Sea as a route to states in Europe and Russia.
New Dutch-Azeri dredger for Baku port
Baku Shipyard and Dutch Damen Shipyards Gorinchem started the construction in Baku of a dredging vessel CSD 650, which is expected to be launched at the end of 2025, Chairman of the Board of Baku Shipyard Elshad Nuriyev said. According to Nuriyev, the vessel is for Baku Port.
“The construction of such a vessel is quite important,” Nuriyev said. Such vessels are required due to the reduced level of the Caspian Sea. For the first time, a vessel of this type will be built in Azerbaijan”.
The new dredging vessel should help Azerbaijan’s Caspian ports to handle vessels with a draft of more than 6 meters, such as 8,000 tonnes tankers operating in the Caspian Sea.
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