On Tuesday, October 13, specialists of OKB “Spetstyazhproekt” delivered and unloaded 440 tons of equipment for Shchekinoazot at a temporary berthing facility in the village of Bunyrevo.  The equipment is intended for the production of nitric acid with a capacity of 270 thousand tons per year and ammonium nitrate with a capacity of 340 thousand tons per year.

The cargo includes three absorption columns and two ammonia oxidation reactors.  The total weight is 440 tons.  All equipment was manufactured by the Chinese company SEDIN Engineering Co.

Sea, river and road transport was involved in the transportation of equipment. The vessel with the equipment arrived in St. Petersburg from Shanghai via the Pacific and Indian Oceans, the Red Sea and the Suez Canal. In the St. Petersburg port, the equipment was reloaded onto a river barge. The cargoes went along the Neva River, Ladoga and Onega lakes, the Shiksa, Volga, Moscow, Oka rivers.  The river route exceeded 1,000 kilometers and took about a month.

All cargo, except for the barge, followed with a check in for customs clearance at the Tula customs post according to the customs transit procedure.  The barge was also transited to the temporary berthing facility in Bunyrevo, where a temporary customs control zone was opened, where customs clearance took place.

“The project was challenging. We faced bad weather on the way along the Ladoga and Onega lakes. Due to the high windage of cargo, it was unsafe to go in a strong wind. The second difficulty is the low water level in the Oka River.  Due to the low water level on the Aleksin – Shchurovo section (0.9 m), three cargoes were reloaded onto the second barge in Kolomna. This allowed the draft of each barge to be reduced to 0.78 meters,” says Vlad Spasenko, project manager for the transportation.

The reloading from barge to barge in Kolomna was carried out by the technologically complex Ro-Ro method.  This method has proven itself well and is successfully used by the engineering company OKB “Spetstyazhproekt”.  With the same Ro-Ro method, barges are unloaded at the temporary berthing facility in Bunyrevo.