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Comment by SiempreViernes | Hacker News Reader

> Jet A-1 fuel is sent to Troll once a year in 200 liter barrels aboard the re-supply ship that docks at the edge of the ice shelf about mid-summer season. All of the supplies, including the fuel, are then taken via tracked vehicles and sledges on a 250 km journey back to the station. That long journey from Denmark helps explain why fuel is so expensive at Troll.

The Norwegian polar institute buys its jet fuel from Denmark?! I knew they are supposed to be close buddies, but that was a surprise.

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The ship is coming from Denmark. The cost of transporting the fuel on that ship across the ocean is probably miniscule compared to the cost of dragging it over land from the ship to the airstrip. Moving heavy things by ship is remarkably cost-efficient, a few dollars per ton to move something across the planet. Getting it that last few miles from ship to customer is where the real costs start.

Exactly. I had a bunch of servers on that ship sent from Norway by truck.

OpenStack and Kubernetes coming to Troll this season!

You know why you use a Danish port? Do they need their icebreakers the least or something? Or is it some historical reason?

Most of the cargo doesn't come from Norway. We try to ship as much as possible from vendors directly to the ship, and not via Northern Norway where the entities involved are located.

Denmark then becomes ideal as we are close with the Danes politically and it's already a shipping hub.

We could have used Cape Town, but it would be harder to have control. Very little cargo fits on these planes and the flights are extremely expensive. We operate a satellite ground station there used for critical missions.

> Moving heavy things by ship is remarkably cost-efficient

This assumes you have sending a huge tanker full of fuel.

When you have a smaller ship to send a handful of barrels of fuel I guess the calculation changes. If not, everybody would be sending fuel in small ships in barrels.

The ship carries all the supplies not just the fuel and since the fuel needs to be transported across land on a tracked vehicle it's easier to do that in barrels than to have a specialty sled made and maintain a tank on the slowly shifting glacier.

Another nuance is likely environmental. They probably could transport the fuel in a big tank and then offload it to smaller containers, but that is a bulk fueling procedure that could go wrong/leak/spill. It is environmentally safer to transport fuel in closed containers all the way to the final destination.

There's tons of reasons traditional tanked shipping makes little sense. Volume, they're going to get quite a bit of fuel but it's still a tiny amount compared to the volume of a tanker. They're also sending down a lot of non liquid cargo, so being able to send it all on one ship makes sense.

A bulk container would be more space-efficient, but on a ship it is the mass that counts against fuel efficiency rather than bulk. The price differences would only be significant when it comes to loading/unloading which, in Antarctica, are a very special case.

The price difference comes from operational overhead on a tiny delivery (of which loading/unloading is a part), not from fuel inefficiency.

The potential additional distance between Denmark and Norway is nothing compared to the overall distance of sailing halfway round the globe to Antartica.

I mean, even sending the ship from Denmark is rather strange, it's not like Norway lacks a coast. Neither is any spot in Denmark the closest spot to Antarctica in continental Europe...

Possibly the danes have the closest port that is home port to an ice breaker?

Transport between Denmark and Greenland probably means Denmark has more suitable shops than Norway.

On the other hand, the northern half of Norway is basically just coast and that a lot of iron ore from Sweden goes by ship from a Norwegian port above the Arctic circle?

Then there's also all that shipping of oil that Norway does...

But that might mean Norway has bulk carriers and tankers, plus coastal vessels.

Denmark should have ocean going mixed freight ships for the Arctic.

I'd say it is likely both countries have both ..

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