The Accessible Arctic: Standards, Safety, and Sustainability

KEY CONCLUSIONS

The Arctic exploration calls for relevant transportation and infrastructure

“Setting up a decent transport infrastructure for the Arctic exploration without a sizeable fleet is outright impossible,” Alexey Abramov, Head of The Federal Agency on Technical Regulating and Metrology (Rosstandart).

“Transportation is an important component because most of the territories are not accessible by ships and helicopters, so automotive vehicles are still used widely. One of the new areas of focus of our enterprise <...> is engineering specialized vehicles that fully meet the requirements imposed for such equipment,” Andrey Savinkov, Chief Design Engineer for KAMAZ vehicles.

A system of standards for doing business in the Arctic is necessary

“The strategic objective is the development of polar operations management system. <...> With peer support from Rostec State Corporation, we managed to transit from corporate standardization to hyphenated standards. Now we want to implement it in a machine-readable format so that the Arctic standards could stay relevant,” Nikita Kuprikov, Director of Polar Initiative.

“Technical committees have developed six international and fourteen national standards of Arctic security. These are, above all, safe work setting, environmental protection, particular requirements for life support systems, evacuation and rescue of personnel, special equipment and materials for mining and shipment of hydrocarbon resources in a polar climate,” Tatyana Lobanova, Deputy Head of the Department – Deputy Head of the Strategic Development Department, OAO Gazprom.

PROBLEMS

Strict Arctic equipment requirements

“The work began with us manually analysing everything that enterprises produce for the Arctic, created a directory with thousands of items. <...> But the biggest hurdle was to gather what really works in the Arctic and what does not. About thirty per cent didn't make it to this catalogue,” Aleksey Besprozvannykh, Deputy Minister of Industry and Trade of the Russian Federation.

SOLUTIONS

Fostering international dialogue and establishing experience pooling mechanisms

“There were many proposals on setting up a territory of dialogue, on the need for Arctic states to communicate at all levels, political and technical. Synergy could be the topic of our discussions: how can we pool our experience, how can we exchange technologies and find ways to accelerate the Arctic development,” Alexey Abramov, Head of the Federal Agency on Technical Regulating and Metrology (Rosstandart).

“We need to create an ideas exchange platform, since today we already have various kinds of cooperatives and associations. And in this regard, it is important for us to set up a single platform for pooling experiences in manufacturing products for the Arctic,” Aleksey Besprozvannykh, Deputy Minister of Industry and Trade of the Russian Federation

Introduction of modern environmentally friendly technologies

“Together with Central Design Bureau Rubin <...>, we are developing not just an underwater drilling rig, but an underwater drilling system with various additional options and modules that are to enable work in fairly deep water, cutting high-tech wells,” Dmitry Kolodyazhny, Vice President for Technical Development, United Shipbuilding Corporation.

“We should keep in mind <...> the environmental impact reduction. In the Soviet Union, this applied science was called industrial ecology. In other words, the environmental impact reduction is not the objective in itself, it is just the improvement of industrial technologies towards their greater resource efficiency,” Dmitry Skobelev, Director of Environmental Industrial Policy Centre.

“Since 2013, a new long-term program has been adopted, and now we have a rather unprecedented volume of investments in the production reconfiguration. From 2019 to 2022, we plan to invest more than eleven billion dollars in the presence regions. But the main thing is, after all, the quality of life of our employees. It is clear that projects are being implemented in an extremely aggressive environment, and if the usual environmental standards are applicable in other regions, then, of course, in the Arctic, the requirements are much stricter,” Dmitry Pristanskov, State Secretary – Vice-President, MMC NORILSK NICKEL.

“We are engaged in system integration, digitalization of industry. Recently, we presented the Smart Helmet, which allows you to monitor employee's body temperature, the environmental data, and the level of gas pollution in real time. <...> We believe that such developments should be standardized both in terms of their integration with other solutions and in terms of their use for work safety,” Nikolay Sudarikov, Head of PR Department at Softline.

Training qualified personnel in accordance with the demands of the economy

“Last year a catalogue of one hundred next-generation professions was published. <...> As part of this work, both social processes and technological challenges were identified, which are to tip the emergence of new specialists in our country shortly, by 2035. The social processes include globalization, a shift in management models for both business and the state, the expansion of the middle class and a transition of consumer preferences, the greening of lifestyle and production processes. The technological challenges are the adoption of information and communication technologies, automation, digitalization, and the emergence of new technologies in general,” Elena Kudryashova, Rector of Lomonosov Northern (Arctic) Federal University (NArFU).