The Economist article says, "the much-vaunted sea passages are likely to carry only a trickle of trade". Do you have any information on the prospective volume of trade?
> it's surrounded solely by states with a strong rule of law, making piracy unlikely.
For another reason too: Piracy usually is conducted by people.
Not really, though COSCO (a top-5 shipper by capacity and market share [1]) expressed interest again in 2016 [2], sending 5 ships through; they were the first Chinese shipping company to send a ship this way in 2013 [3], and express a continued interest almost every year -- like in 2015 [4].
Russian forecasts are extremely ambitious to the point of being pure wishful thinking [5]. There are some challenges with the route [5][6], and not all shippers are on board, and of course global shipping has just had its lowest growth in years [7].
[1] https://www.alphaliner.com/top100/ [2] https://thebarentsobserver.com/en/arctic-industry-and-energy... [3] http://barentsobserver.com/en/arctic/2013/08/first-container... [4] https://www.wsj.com/articles/chinese-shipper-cosco-to-schedu... [5] https://thebarentsobserver.com/en/arctic-industry-and-energy... [6] http://www.platts.com/latest-news/shipping/moscow/feature-de... [7] http://www.npr.org/sections/parallels/2016/08/20/490621376/a...