KUAC - Fairbanks

The utility that provides power to Tok is looking into using liquefied natural gas as a way to reduce the cost of generating electricity for the Alaska Highway community.

Alaska Power and Telephone President Bob Grimm says he’s optimistic that using LNG to help generate electricity in the Tok area could save money for the company and ratepayers. That’s based on preliminary results of testing AP&T conducted in late September and early October.

“It’s proven itself, that it probably is a potential fuel opportunity in the future,” Grimm said. “And our next step is to look at it a lot closer, and see if we can dissect every one of those issues that we ran into, and make it better.”

The testing involved setting up and operating equipment to store and use LNG, including systems to enable the company’s diesel-fueled generators to burn an LNG and diesel blend. Grimm says a mix of 65 percent LNG, 35 percent diesel worked well during the tests. He says savings would come from using less diesel that would be displaced by LNG during internal combustion.

Grimm concedes today’s low diesel prices make that unlikely – “Diesel is probably a better buy right now,” he said – but he expects prices to begin rising in the near future, which should make the economics of bi-fueled electricity more attractive.

“If it was cheaper than diesel at some point in the future, when we started to run it on a routine basis, any of those fuel savings would be passed down to our customers in Tok,” he said.

That would be welcome news to AP&T’s Tok-area residents, who pay about twice as much as ratepayers in Fairbanks. Dave Callos says he thinks it’s a great idea to use LNG to help generate power, but is unlikely to happen until diesel prices go back up and the economies of scale make the cost of transporting LNG go down.

“Liquefied natural gas is a great thing,” Callos said. “We have so much of it in this state. But until the price of trucking it down here goes down, we’re not going to be able to afford it.”

Grimm says that’s true, but the company wanted to test the technology and have it ready for when and if the company decides to use it when the price of diesel rises. Crowley LNG Alaska would provide the gas through a contract with AP&T, although the LNG used during testing came from Fairbanks Natural Gas.

Crowley officials said in a news release they’ve been working with AP&T for more than a year now on the project, providing engineering and other assistance.

But Tok resident Ashley Sawyer says she didn’t know anything about the test until she and many of her neighbors read about it on Facebook a couple of weeks ago – after testing had concluded.

“The general public didn’t know,” Sawyer said. “Nobody I know here knew. It was like, when it concluded, everybody knew – we all found out.”

Grimm says using LNG to help AP&T avoid exceeding emissions limits set by its state air-quality permit because LNG burns more cleanly than diesel. And he says it would enable AP&T to expand and provide service to more customers at less cost.

“If we were to get any sizeable load growth, we would have to start operating cleaner machines, more expensive machines, (and) different things to make sure that we remain below the limit,” he said.

Grimm says AP&T will likely conduct more tests on the bi-fueled generator project. But he says it’ll have to wait until spring when Fairbanks Natural Gas won’t be so busy serving its winter fuel customers – and will have equipment and personnel available for the 200-mile trip to Tok.

Two Georgia men planned to attack the High-Frequency Active Auroral Research Program, or HAARP, facility in Gakona, Alaska.

Michael Mancil, 30, and James Kenneth Dryden, 21, both of Douglas, Georgia, were arrested Thursday night, the Douglas Enterprise reported.

They were loading weapons, including assault rifles, thousands of rounds of ammunition, bullet proof vests, radio communications equipment and $5,000 cash into a vehicle.

The men could face federal charges.

Mancil told police the plan was to travel to Alaska, hijack guards at HAARP and blow up a machine there that was “trapping human souls.”

Mancil already was being investigated in connection with dealing drugs, Coffee County Sherriff Doyle Wooten told the Douglas Enterprise.

Mancil appeared to radicalize in recent weeks after watching online videos about HAARP, Wooten said.

The HAARP facility consists of a powerful radio transmitter and a field of large antennas.

Built by the military for ionospheric research, it has long been the subject of conspiracy theories ranging from weather manipulation to mind control.

The $300 million facility was transferred from the Air Force to the University of Alaska Fairbanks last year, and Geophysical Institute public information officer Sue Mitchell said the school was notified about the threat on Monday.

”And we’ve talked to them and we are investigating the whole situation,” Mitchell said. “We have security in place at HAARP and have had so we don’t think that these guys would’ve been able to make it through the Canadian border with the weapons that they had, but of course we’re paying a lot of attention and we’re concerned.”

The university is trying to dispel conspiracy theories that have proliferated since the 1990s, when the Navy and then Air Force first constructed the facility, Mitchell said.

”Try to explain to people what is is actually capable of which is some very interesting science,” she said. “Studying the aurora and studying ways that the ionosphere affects communication satellites and other things. So we plan to we plan to use the facility for real, good basic science.”

The university held an open house at HAARP in August that was attended by 350 people.

Mitchell said the university is negotiating with three potential contractors for grant-funded research at the facility that could begin as soon as February.

Fairbanks is mourning the loss of a police officer. Sgt. Allen Brandt, 34, who was shot earlier this month, died Friday of complications following surgery to remove shrapnel from one of his eyes. Community members gathered for a candlelight vigil Friday night to honor and remember the 11 year Fairbanks Police Department veteran.

Hundreds of people held candles as acting police chief Brad Johnson, visibly shaken by the unexpected death of Brandt, addressed the gathering.

“I want you to know that all of us here feel your love,” Johnson said. “We love you too, and we’ll pass your love on to Allen’s family.”

Brandt, by all accounts, seemed to be on his way to recovering from multiple gunshot wounds, and his death Friday shocked the city. Mayor Jim Matherly recounted how earlier in the week Brandt had walked into city hall and addressed the council members.

”He spoke to us about being united, about what it was like to be a police officer,” Matherly said. “But this man was so selfless he actually said other cops have done more than he has done. He was the one who suffered this horrific event, yet he was thinking of his fellow officers.”

Matherly closed by asking the public to keep Brandt’s wife and four children in their thoughts and prayers.

According to the Fairbanks Police Department, Brandt was shot when he responded to a report of gunfire on a downtown street after midnight, on Oct. 16. Anthony Jenkins-Alexie, 29, of Anchorage, has been charged with multiple felonies, including attempted murder — a charge that Fairbanks prosecutors said may be amended, now that Brandt has died.

Brandt is the second FPD officer to be killed in the line of duty in recent history. Officer Kevin Lamb was shot and killed in 1998.

Services for Brandt are still being planned.

National Weather Service meteorologist Rick Thoman predicts more snow, more cold snaps – more normal winter weather – in Alaska this year now that the El Niño phase that helped make last winter so mild has moved on and been replaced by a La Niña.

At least, that’s what’s happened in previous years. But he says climate change has made forecasting in the Arctic more challenging.

“Well, that is the big problem with using the past to inform the future,” Thoman said.

Experts such as John Walsh, chief scientist with the University of Alaska Fairbanks’ International Arctic Research Center, say climate change always must be taken into consideration when analyzing weather in the far north.

“No weather event is completely independent of climate change,” Walsh said in an interview last year.

Thoman says the weather service has pretty good data collected over the past 65 years on the so-called Pacific Decadal Oscillation, or PDO, cycle that drives El Niños and La Niñas.

But he says meteorologists are relying on data from recent years because climate change is a more recent phenomenon that’s made older data, collected before the Arctic began to warm so quickly, less relevant.

“So it does shorten our record, and that’s bad, because then we wind up with fewer, say, La Niñas winters to develop these kinds of averages,” he said. “But the tradeoff is that we’re not including winters that are not really appropriate for what we have today.”

The size and location of a large body of warm water in the equatorial Pacific Ocean drive the transition from El Niño to La Niña. And Thoman says researchers are studying other phenomena that occur in lower latitudes that may play a role in La Niña. But he says in the Arctic, it’s the local factors that exert a more powerful influence on the region’s weather.

“The changes are happening so fast in the Arctic – with sea-ice loss, with increased time of no snow cover – that that’s really the driving feature. And the lower-latitude factors are being swamped those big cryosphere changes,” he said.

And because sea ice is sparse around Alaska, and snow comes later and melts sooner, Thoman says this winter is likely to be cooler and snowier than the past few winters. Still, he says it’ll be a relatively mild winter, compared with La Niña winters of years past, because the climate overall is warmer now.

Fairbanks city police Chief Randall Aragon is on administrative leave again.

A week after outgoing Mayor John Eberhart returned Aragon to duty, newly sworn in Mayor Jim Matherly reversed the order Tuesday and put the chief back on paid leave.

The decision is because an independent investigation into whether or not a private security business operated by the chief constitutes a conflict of interest, is still pending, Matherly said.

“It’s my responsibility to see the report, present it to the council and then decide what the next action should be,” Matherly said. “But I wanted to send a message that whether you’re the chief or somebody else in city hall, you need to be held to the same standard of at least getting in the report and then finalizing it that way.”

Aragon was first placed on leave in mid-September, when allegations were initially leveled.

In bringing the chief back last week, former Mayor Eberhart cited several reasons, including an internal city investigation that found nothing requiring corrective or disciplinary action.

Deputy Chief Brad Johnson has resumed the role of acting chief.

A year ago, National Weather Service meteorologist Rick Thoman and many other forecasters and climate researchers knew the winter of 2015-16 was going to be a warm one.

“We had warm sea-surface temperatures all around Alaska in the late fall,” Thoman said. “We had below-normal sea ice. And we had a strong El Niño.”

So, prognostications of the warm Arctic winter to come last year may be in hindsight as close to a no-brainer as it gets for the complex science of weather forecasting. And sure enough, the winter was the warmest on record, warmer than the previous record-setting winter and the unusually warm 2013 season.

“Last year was pretty easy,” he said. “The climate dice were all loaded toward warm for Alaska.”

But not so this year, Thoman says, largely because the warm-weather-inducing El Niño has faded away and been replaced by a quirky La Nina.

“This year,” he said, “I’m going to have to work for my forecast.”

Thoman says La Niñas generally portend a cooler winter for Alaska, south of the Brook Range, and more precipitation for areas along and near the coasts. But he says that tendency is going to be somewhat moderated this winter, because a couple of factors left over from last year.

“We have continued warm sea-surface temperatures near Alaska, both in the Gulf of Alaska and in the Bering Sea,” Thoman said. He added the seawater isn’t quite as warm as last fall, especially in the Gulf of Alaska. But as for the other factor …

“We have even less sea ice near Alaska than we had last year, at this time.”

For those reasons, Thoman predicts the coming winter in the Arctic will be a bit warmer than normal – both here in Alaska and elsewhere around the region. But he concedes that forecast is mainly based on data from the past few decades when the circumpolar north began to warm at an extraordinary rate.

“Because conditions now are so different than they were, say, in the 1950s and ’60s, we don’t include those older (data), and start, say, in the mid-70s” for a more relevant set of data.

Next week: The challenges of Arctic weather forecasting in a warming climate.

Editor’s note: More information about climate change impact on Alaska is available through the Alaska Center for Climate Assessment and Policy.