Arctic Gateway Group inks MOU with Fednav, eyes on year-round port access

Leadership behind the Port of Churchill has struck a deal to explore year-round shipping with a global company.

Currently, boats can enter the northern Manitoba port during a four-month window (July through October).

Arctic Gateway Group, the port’s owner, has inked a memorandum of understanding with Fednav, Canada’s largest international dry bulk shipping company, to evaluate whether 12-month operations are sustainable.

“We believe that having year-round access to the Port of Churchill is a possibility,” said Chris Avery, Arctic Gateway Group’s chief executive.

The Hudson Bay’s ice-free season is continually extending. Meantime, the provincial and federal governments are funnelling money into the site, touting it as a route to markets like Europe.

Fednav has technology to ship through ice, Avery said. The Montreal-based company counts around 120 vessels and delivers more than 30 million tonnes of cargo annually.

“The Arctic is a core part of our business,” said Stéfany Corey, Fednav senior manager of communications. “We ship year-round everywhere that we go.”

Partnering with Arctic Gateway Group seemed like a “logical exploration,” Corey continued. Both parties will bring members to a working group. The cluster will meet monthly starting in October, Corey said.

She wouldn’t detail the types of shipments Fednav might ferry through the Port of Churchill. Fednav has contracts with mining partners, she added.

It was attracted to Churchill because of the work Arctic Gateway Group has been doing in the area and the organization’s “strong ties” with community, Corey said.

Forty-one Indigenous and Bayside communities make up Arctic Gateway. It’s been revitalizing the port and the Hudson Bay Railway since taking ownership in 2018.

Arctic Gateway Group and the federal government are co-funding a study on how many months the Hudson Bay is navigable for shipping. Insurance premiums increase “exponentially” for companies trying to ship outside of July through October, Avery relayed. “We believe that the insurance companies are operating off of decade-old data.”

Providing insurance companies with new data from the University of Manitoba could decrease rates in shoulder seasons, Avery continued.

On average, the Hudson Bay has seen another ice-free day per year since the 1980s. This has totalled a new month without ice when comparing today to the 1980s, said Feiyue Wang.

Wang is the Canada Research Chair in Arctic environmental chemistry. The University of Manitoba professor is part of a team behind the new shipping study.

The preliminary report should be ready within months, but it must go through a peer review process before publication. The latter process could take up to a year, Wang said.

Past research from the U of M’s Centre for Earth Observation Science, which Wang is part of, has forecast the Hudson Bay will become “essentially ice-free” by the end of the century.

“From a scientist point of view, definitely, the bay is becoming more open,” Wang said. “We will see a much longer shipping season from Churchill.”

Wang echoed a phrase Premier Wab Kinew has touted, calling Manitoba a “maritime province.”

Arctic Gateway Group announced in July it was doubling the number of weekly freight trains along the Hudson Bay Railway and tripling storage capacity of critical minerals this year.

The railway connects The Pas to Churchill. The Port of Churchill is Canada’s only deep-water Arctic port connected to a North American surface transportation network.

The season’s first shipment of zinc concentrate was being loaded Friday, Avery said. He expects upwards of 20,000 tonnes of zinc concentrate to move through the port this year.

Last summer marked the return of critical mineral shipments in more than 20 years; the port saw 10,000 tonnes of zinc concentrate. (The federal government deems zinc a critical mineral.)

gabrielle.piche@winnipegfreepress.com