Alaska's Energy Desk

Only three votes now separate two northern Alaska House candidates.

Dean Westlake of Kotzebue has 780 votes, ahead of 777 votes for incumbent Rep. Ben Nageak, who’s from Barrow.

Alaska’s Division of Elections is still counting votes from House District 40, which stretches from Kotzebue to Kaktovik.

Elections director Josie Bahnke said a review board met in Nome on Tuesday, Aug. 23, and certified 42 ballots in the race.

But, there are still more to count.

“I’ve been talking to staff about this being a marathon, not a sprint.”

Bahnke’s division has come under fire in recent days for voting irregularities in the Northwest Arctic village of Shungnak. Voters there were given ballots for both primaries, though they only were supposed to get one.

Bahnke’s division is working with the Department of Law to determine what to do if the added ballots in Shungnak appear to change the outcome of the race, she said.

There are at least 120 ballots left to count for House District 40, which includes questioned, special needs and absentee ballots.

The state deadline to count absentee ballots is Friday.

The election should be certified by September 2.

The race is one of two that State Democratic Party officials targeted in an attempt to unseat two Democrats who caucus with the Republican-led House majority.

The challengers, and party officials, say they’re hoping to build a bipartisan coalition in the House.

With no Republicans in either race, the candidate who wins won’t have a general election challenger.

 

The future of monitoring Arctic ice begins in space.

NASA scientist Thomas Wagner said to think of the IceSat-2 like a giant laser pointer.

Rather than entertaining your cat, these lasers can measure the height of ice above the water. A total of six of them will be beamed down to Earth.

“The point being that we’re going to get our most accurate maps ever of the thickness of the Arctic sea ice,” Wagner said. “And that’s one of the most important things that we put into our models.”

Those models could influence conservation and planning decisions in the Arctic, Wagner said.

NASA launched a prototype of IceSat in the early 2000s, but it was decommissioned in 2010.

This new and improved satellite — along with additional measurements collected by NASA — will help determine what the future could look like in the Arctic.

And it’s happening at an important time.

“A lot of ice experts, including myself, thought we were headed for a record year minimum,” said Hajo Eicken, a professor at the International Arctic Research Center at the University of Alaska Fairbanks.

Arctic sea ice is important because it acts like a giant air conditioner for our planet, he said.

This year, a combination of events, such as a major ice retreat near Russia, left scientists wondering if the summer would beat a previous low. The last recorded minimum in the Arctic was in 2012.

But wind patterns offset the loss of sea ice and things cooled down a little.

“So now it looks like we’ll have well below normal ice extent, but we won’t have that record minimum,” Eicken said.

Still, Eicken said scientists are trying to figure out how the blob — a large pool of warm water in the Pacific Ocean — could be affecting the Arctic.

Sunlight is the most effective way to melt ice.

“However, the heat that comes up from below, some of it actually survives the winter,” Eicken said. “So in part, what we’re seeing now is that we have years where some of the heat that’s put into the ocean, upper ocean, from the sun and the atmosphere in the summer survives well into the winter.”

That could mean melt episodes even in the colder months.

Eicken is excited about the NASA satellite, which can help document these changes.

Even though what it finds might appear alarming, Wagner said people should be concerned, not afraid.

“Look, I have kids, too, and I’m not hopeless at all,” Wagner said. “All the time I see things that are going on in society that make me think that we are generating the social will to deal with this. And I think we’re getting a better handle on the challenges that we face today, and I think we are going to be able to deal with them.”

IceSat-2 is set to launch in 2018.

After four credit downgrades in eight months, Alaska received some good news Monday: S&P Global will not lower the state’s credit rating — at least for now.

That announcement came as something of a surprise: S&P warned in June that if lawmakers couldn’t come up with a long-term budget solution, it would likely knock down Alaska’s credit rating within 90 days.

But S&P analyst John Sugden said Gov. Bill Walker’s decision to veto $1.3 billion in spending — including half of residents’ PFD checks — bought the state some breathing room.

“While there isn’t permanent reform, and there’s still a long-term structural imbalance, we feel the actions taken by the governor and the legislature buy Alaska some time while they sort out how they’re going to bring their budget back into balance,” Sugden said in a phone interview.

In its report, S&P noted that with the veto, Alaska will draw about $3.2 billion from savings — about the same amount it would have taken under the long-term fiscal plan proposed by the governor last year.

Alaska still has a negative outlook, which means S&P could downgrade the state within one to two years. A lower credit rating makes it more expensive for the state and communities to borrow money, and it’s a signal to markets about the strength of state finances.

S&P first downgraded Alaska from its highest AAA rating in January. That was followed by downgrades from the two other major rating firms, Moody’s Investors Service and Fitch Ratings.

Alaska still holds a solid AA+ rating from S&P, largely because of its large savings accounts. But in its report, the agency warned that if lawmakers do not agree on some kind of “structural fiscal reform” in the coming session, that rating is likely to drop.

“In our view,” S&P’s analysts wrote, “the future of Alaska’s creditworthiness likely hinges on the willingness and ability of its political leaders to reach agreement on substantive fiscal reforms in the coming months.”

Oil prices were up for the third straight week last week.

In Alaska, North Slope crude rose to nearly $50 a barrel by the end of the week.

That’s much higher than the $40-a-barrel price the state based this year’s budget on. But, the price isn’t nearly high enough to fill the state’s massive $3.2 billion budget deficit.

Ken Alper, director of the state’s tax division, said each dollar increase in the price of oil works out to about $25-$30 million in revenue for the state. And while that’s helpful, it’s not going to balance the budget.

“I don’t think we’re expecting it to move very much and once again we’re anticipating over a $3 billion dollar deficit so a few hundred extra million is certainly helpful but it still means a large shortfall for the current year,” Alper said.

Alper said the rebound in prices is good for oil companies.

“The big difference that happens around $46 a barrel is, that is, per our estimates, around the break even point for the major producers on the North Slope,” he said.

That break even point is a big deal for the state. If oil stays at that price, the state is guaranteed a four percent tax on production. Any lower and the companies can claim credits that reduce the state’s tax revenue.

But the price of oil is still half of the $102-per-barrel needed to balance the state’s budget this year.

Alper said that it is technically possible oil prices could get back up to that level, but very unlikely.

“It’s a small likelihood. There’s certainly a possibility. We can’t discount it. But if I had to put a number out there, I’d put it in the less than 5% category,” he said.

There are several factors affecting the price of oil. A big one is that global inventories of crude oil are high and the market is oversupplied. Analysts say that isn’t likely to change soon.

Members of the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries, or OPEC, are set to meet with other producers in September to discuss freezing production. That fueled speculation that drove prices up last week.

Esa Ramasamy, is an analyst for S&P Global Platts.  He said OPEC signalling that it would discuss capping production could drive prices up in the short term, but other factors have longer lasting impacts on the market, like the forecast.

“This year, they believe the winter is going to be much cooler than what it was last year,” he said.

Hurricane season can also drive oil prices up as storms hit the Gulf of Mexico and halt production at rigs there. But, Ramasay said there are other factors that could pull prices down. Of those, one of the most critical is investment.

As oil prices cratered, companies stopped investing. Ramasamy says there hasn’t been any measurable investment in the last two years.

In Alaska, low prices have caused the state to dip into its $8 billion constitutional budget reserve to close the deficit this year.

And, while more revenue from the bump in oil prices will cause the state to draw less on its savings, the problem is far from resolved.

By Monday, prices had fallen by 3 percent, making it seem even less likely that they’ll rebound to budget-balancing highs anytime soon.

 

After combing through data from the Aleutian Islands, a scientist has discovered an unexpected relationship between plankton and pink salmon. Although plankton might seem like an ecological afterthought, biological oceanographer Sonia Batten disagrees. She calls them the most important organisms in the ocean.

“They’re the basis of every marine food chain pretty much,” said Batten. “They support directly, or indirectly, the resources that we value.”

That means even if a species isn’t eating the plankton itself, its food source probably is. Scientists consider plankton good indicators of what’s happening in the environment.

“Because they have short life cycles, they have very limited ability to move, and they’re not commercially fished,” she said. “They react very quickly to changes in their environment in a relatively unambiguous way.”

Batten has 15 years of data from plankton pulls in Alaskan waters. That involves dragging a net behind commercial cargo ships. When there are a lot of pink salmon, they eat up a lot of animal plankton. But when pink salmon numbers are low, the animal plankton flourish.

Those impacts permeate the entire food chain — past their immediate prey. And if the pink salmon eat a lot plankton, there may not be much food left for other predators.

In 2013, Batten started seeing something unusual.

“This was the first time that I’ve seen that the fish are actually influencing the plankton,” she said.

2013 was a bumper year for pinks, and the data began to look different. Batten didn’t see that big decrease in plankton. And now she’s left with a question: What changed?

“Pink salmon were supposedly in really high numbers in 2013, so I would have expected to see the same numbers,” she said. “But I didn’t, so that suggests that something’s going on in the environment that I don’t know about yet.”

Batten says it could be that the salmon are eating something else. She’s planning to continue looking for answers.

Correction: A previous version of this story indicated that plankton pulls were done using commercial fishing boats. In fact, scientists used commercial cargo ships.

The luxury liner Crystal Serenity on its way from Seward to New York City through the Northwest Passage.

It’s the largest cruise ship to navigate the route, which hugs the coasts of Alaska, Canada and Greenland. And it’s attracted international attention, with many wondering if it’s a sign of what’s to come as the Arctic sees increasingly ice-free summers.

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The ship has 13 decks, eight restaurants, a casino, and a spa. Staterooms for this trip started at about $20,000 and run as high as $120,000 (with personal butler service).

Sitting in her room, with a deck looking out over the Seward harbor, passenger Moira Somers said, for many of the people on board, the ship is as much a destination as the Arctic.

“When you start your cruise, no matter where in the world you are, and you get on the ship, and you see the ship, it’s goosebump stuff,” she said.

Somers and her husband live in Victoria, B.C. (she’s originally from Namibia). Like the majority of people on board, they’re repeat cruisers – she says this is perhaps her 16th trip with Crystal.

But this time is a little bit different.

“Maybe we’re not so sure what we’re letting ourselves in for?” she said with a laugh. “But there’s so much, we’ve read so much, we’ve prepared ourselves, and we know it’s a big thing.”

Until about a decade ago, the Northwest Passage was only open to ships with icebreaking capabilities. And while smaller cruise ships have visited the region for years, the Crystal Serenity, with more than 1600 guests and crew, will become the largest passenger ship to traverse the full, winding route across the top of Canada.

It’s a dry run for large-scale tourism in a region that hasn’t seen anything like it before.

But the man in charge is not concerned.

Birgir Vorland, the master of the Crystal Serenity, has spent 38 years at sea. Originally from Norway, he said the Northwest Passage has special resonance.

“My countryman Roald Amundsen did the first transit here, between 1903 and 1906,” Vorland said. “He spent three years on this passage. We’re going to do it in 32 days and a lot more comfort.”

Crystal Cruises has spent more than three years planning the trip. Standing on the navigation bridge, Vorland ticked off the special preparations: systems to detect ice, two Canadian ice pilots joining him in Nome, an escort ship in case he runs into trouble.

“We have crossed all the t’s, dotted all the i’s,” he said. “Nobody has ever planned a cruise as diligently and as detailed as Crystal Cruises has done for this particular voyage.”

As the ship prepared to leave Seward, passengers participated in an emergency drill. In the casino, guests wearing life jackets gathered around staff holding signs that read, “Life Boat 6.”

Despite Vorland’s assurances, plenty of people are worried about what happens if this scenario plays out in real life.

“There’s absolutely no capacity to respond to accidents,” said Elena Agarkova, who tracks shipping for the World Wildlife Fund, a conservation group.

There’s very little search and rescue infrastructure in the Arctic, and it’s a major concern for authorities. On August 24th, just as the Crystal Serenity passes through the region, the Coast Guard, U.S. military and Canadian forces will stage a major training exercise in the Bering Strait. Called Arctic Chinook, it will simulate the response to a cruise ship going down with 250 people on board.

The question isn’t just whether the Crystal Serenity ready for the Arctic, but if the Arctic ready for the Crystal Serenity. Some of the communities it’s visiting in Canada have populations smaller than the ship itself.

Agarkova said Crystal Cruises has done a good job of working with communities and addressing environmental concerns, with plans to forgo heavy fuel oil and exceed standards for discharging wastewater. But, she said, there’s no guarantee those precautions will be taken in the future.

“They’re doing these measures voluntarily,” she said. “So there’s nothing that would require cruise lines or cruise ships that would follow in their steps to adhere to the same kinds of standards.”

And Agarkova pointed out the irony of this new era — when the very changes making the region accessible are also transforming it.

That’s not lost on passenger Moira Somers.

“One kind of feels – I won’t say guilty, but you’re taking advantage of what is happening,” Somers said, adding that she hopes the cruise is raising awareness of climate change.

As for her more immediate goals? “My big dream is to see a polar bear,” she said.

After a moment she added, with a laugh, “And just being able to have a successful trip, I think. Getting through with no hiccups.”