OREANDA-NEWS. July 23, 2010. Freight One has carried 13,500 metric tons of barite ore under a contract for the Nord Stream international gas transportation project. The deliveries were made from Bogradsky Mining Plant at Chernogorskiye Kopi Station in Khakassia on the Krasnoyarsk Railway to Ochakovo Station on the Moscow Railway.

Barite ore is being delivered in Freight One cars to Moscow Pipe Plant, which is manufacturing pipes for the Nord Stream project according to pipe-in-pipe technology, which involves filling the space between pipes of different diameters with barite concentrate, which serves as a weighting material to secure the pipe in place on the ocean floor.

In addition, the barite ore being supplied will be used in the manufacture of special deep-water pipes for the Sakhalin Energy project.

The transportation scheme is multi-modal; at the Moscow transport node, ore from the cars is loaded onto trucks and hauled to the production site. The freight is packed in big bags, which allows faster loading and unloading. It is planned that Freight One will make the bulk of the deliveries under the contract by October, while weather conditions allow the laying of the pipes on the ocean floor.