(Today, URN Behind the Scenes tells the story of a complicated, sometimes dangerous mission to deliver four shiploads of pipe from Asia to sites through war time as Ukraine seeks to loosen Russia’s stranglehold on the European natural gas market.)
US supply chain solutions company Logistics Plus, Inc. has just finished delivering $100 million worth of gas pipes to hundreds of sites in Ukraine in a complex effort that involved offloading ships onto 1,000 trucks to avoid anti-ship mines in the Black Sea, unloading times shortened by nearby missile attacks, and ever-shifting dispatch operations amid the vagaries of war.
The pipes, weighing 22,000 tonnes and filling four breakbulk ships, took 14 months to order, fabricate and prepare, then eight months to deliver. Working from Poland, Ukraine, Turkey, China and the US, staffers from Logistics Plus and Vorex, LLC the American oil and gas equipment supplier that won the contract to supply the pipe to Ukrainian state gas producer Naftogaz, negotiated a fickle typhoon season in the Sea of China, extreme congestion at Romania’s Black Sea port of Constanta, and the threat of physical harm from the biggest land war in Europe since Hitler.
The final shipload of casing and drilling pipe was delivered last month directly to the Ukrainian port of Chornomorsk. It was the first time since the Russian invasion of 2022, at least on public record, that a foreign ship managed to arrive at the Black Sea port with something other than grain, a commodity that was given safe clearance at times under a deal with the Russians. Until then, non-grain ships had avoided the port for fear of hostile action.
