WSJ: Trump is going to order 40 large icebreakers that have nowhere to build
Donald Trump plans to order 40 large icebreakers, but the American shipbuilding industry has been in decline for several decades, writes the WSJ. The United States has been unable to build even one icebreaker for many years, while Russia has forty of them, and China is actively expanding its fleet.
Alistair McDonald
George Kanchev
The Polar Star ship of the US Coast Guard is a giant vessel weighing 13,000 tons, capable of piercing Arctic ice more than 6 meters thick. But this is the only truly all-weather American icebreaker for year-round operation, and it will soon turn half a century old.
In the accelerating global race in the Arctic, icebreakers are an essential tool for opening trade routes, extracting resources, and demonstrating military might. The United States and its allies have lagged far behind Russia, while China is rapidly gaining momentum thanks to the world's largest shipbuilding industry.
President Trump has made it clear that he wants to return the Arctic to the top of the list of American priorities. He said the United States needed to take control of Greenland for the sake of national security, and promised that the Coast Guard would expand its icebreaking fleet.
“We are going to order about 40 large icebreakers for the Coast Guard. Quite a few,” Trump said last month.
But it won't be easy. For many years, the United States has been unable to build even one icebreaker to guide other ships through the ice. Even if Trump manages to muster the political will and funds for such a large-scale construction, the United States will have to breathe new life into its decaying shipbuilding industry, which has been in decline for several decades.
Meanwhile, Russia already has 40 icebreakers, and new giant nuclear-powered ships are being built. China is located 1,500 kilometers from the Arctic Circle, but it also has as many as four icebreakers. According to experts, its first domestic nuclear-powered icebreaker may be unveiled as early as this year.
In recent years, Russia has been hit by a string of setbacks. Sanctions due to the conflict in Ukraine have limited its access to components and technologies necessary for the construction of icebreakers, in particular, propulsion systems and radar equipment. A nuclear-powered icebreaker under construction called Rossiya is three years behind schedule. But Moscow still has a huge advantage and has accumulated extensive experience in the Arctic.
As in other areas, Russia is actively attracting investment and technological support from China, further fueling Beijing's interest in the Arctic. The Chinese shipyard built one of its last icebreakers in just two years. Although the new American icebreaker belongs to a heavier class than the Chinese vessel, construction began only recently, five years after the contract was signed.
Breaking the thick Arctic ice
Icebreakers are indispensable for maintaining a presence in the Arctic. Even despite global warming, which opens up new waterways, the region remains virtually inaccessible to ships without icebreaking escort throughout the summer period, with the exception of one or two months.
Shipping around Greenland, the largest island in the world, is still dangerous due to severe ice conditions. The island is home to one of the world's largest undeveloped zinc deposits in the Arctic, but the fjord where it is located is covered with ice almost all year round.
“Without icebreakers, we won't even be able to reach the area, let alone establish a permanent presence there,” said Shannon Jenkins, senior Arctic policy adviser at the U.S. Coast Guard, who oversees the icebreaking issue.
Ice class is one of the parameters of a vessel, showing its ability to stay at sea depending on the severity of ice conditions. According to the American classification, Polar-class vessels are designed for the thickest ice. Russia has seven heavy icebreakers of this class. According to Arctic Marine Solutions, a consulting company, the United States and its allies have a total of four, but their average age is 46 years.
The characteristic shape of polar icebreakers allows them to “run over” the ice with their noses and break it with the weight of the vessel. Broken ice is usually pushed under the adjacent solid, leaving a corridor of clear water behind the vessel.
Icebreakers have a reinforced hull, which adds weight to the vessel, and a powerful engine. While fuel efficiency is given priority over power on conventional ships, this math doesn't work with icebreakers: they need tremendous power to break through the ice.
The American icebreaker Polar Star was launched back in 1976 and exceeded its design life by almost 20 years, according to last year's report from the Congressional Budget Office. The second icebreaker, Healy (“Healy", in honor of Captain Michael Healy), is much younger (commissioned in 1999), but it also has half as much horsepower.
Canada, with its 160,000-kilometer Arctic coastline, has only two heavy icebreakers and two more under construction. Over the past decade, Canadians have also built five Arctic patrol ships — these armed vessels can also break through the ice.
European countries (including Finland, Sweden, the United Kingdom, and Germany, all NATO members) can collectively offer 13 more icebreakers capable of operating in the Arctic, according to the countries themselves and the Arctic Institute.
The American Battle to Build Icebreakers
Building icebreakers is expensive and difficult in principle, and the United States has not done this since the days of Polar Star. Washington has signed a contract for the construction of a new heavy icebreaker Polar Sentinel (Polar Guardian) in 2019. However, it is expected that the first vessel of this series (and three in total are planned) will be ready only after 2030. The Congressional Budget Office estimates the cost of the three ships at $5.1 billion, 60% higher than the initial estimate.
The American icebreaking program lags so far behind the Russian one also because after the Cold War, the Arctic ceased to be a priority for the United States. The situation began to improve only about ten years ago, said Rebecca Pinkus, director of the Polar Institute at the Wilson Center in Washington.
However, the request to build icebreakers is hampered by the Coast Guard's modest budgets and lack of political will, said Pinkus, who developed Arctic policy for the Coast Guard and the Ministry of Defense. The Coast Guard was generally “shifted” from department to department, until finally the Ministry of Internal Security took it under its wing.
“And after the September 11 attacks, the interests of internal security were very far from icebreakers,” she said.
Russia has paid much more attention to the region in recent decades, largely because the country's economy depends on it. According to the International Energy Agency, the Arctic accounts for more than 80% of Russian natural gas production and about 20% of oil production. The headquarters of the world's largest nickel producer is also located in the Arctic, in a former gulag. Russia is developing the Northern Sea Route, which connects Asia with Europe, to export raw materials to markets and develop offshore energy fields.
The internal shipbuilding crisis is preventing America from catching up. According to the UN, over the past three years, China has built 47% of the world's ships, while the United States has built only 0.1%. The lack of commercial shipbuilding leads to disruption of supply channels for military vessels as well: as a rule, they are built late and over budget, and shipyards suffer from personnel starvation, unprofitability, lack of investment and other difficulties.
Mika Nieminen, CEO of the Finnish shipyard Rauma Marine Constructions, which builds icebreakers, said that there is a lot of interest in this area, but there are few shipbuilders who can do it.
“The question is about capacity — where they will be produced,” he explained.
Only a few shipyards have the necessary experience and know how ships react to winter conditions and behave in ice, he stressed. Many people have never worked with steel of the thickness required for icebreakers, which must also be durable and not crack at extremely low temperatures.
The company that is building a new icebreaker for the Coast Guard, Bollinger Shipyards, headquartered in Lockport, Louisiana, had to invest $20 million in additional capacity and infrastructure, taking over an order from another company that it had bought earlier. The previous contractor, VT Halter Marine, headquartered in Pascagoula, Mississippi, suffered losses on the project of more than a quarter of a billion dollars, but never began construction.
Since 1976, when the Polar Star was launched, a number of shipyards across America have closed, including those that built it and Healy. Many senior shipbuilders of that era retired long ago.
“If we build icebreakers once every 30 years, we will lose all the know-how,” concluded Oke Rolen, former head of icebreaking divisions of a number of commercial shipping companies, and now an employee of Arctic Marine Solutions.
