Arctic

Juneau is home to the Alaska Permanent Fund Corp. And this week, the capital city was also home to the International Forum of Sovereign Wealth Funds.

It was the first time the annual meeting has been held in the United States, and it offered a unique chance for the state to pitch itself as a great investment opportunity to wealth managers from across the globe.

The International Forum of Sovereign Wealth Funds isn’t a conference you can easily crash. There are several security guards posted by the entryways. It would be a tough feat to sneak into the buffet line.

In two days of closed sessions, attendees traded info on best practices for investing billions of dollars on behalf of nations or states. But Thursday was open to the media and broadcast to the public.

At a morning panel discussion, the conversation turned to the Arctic.

“Is a warming Arctic the next gold rush?” asked a representative from the Kuwait Investment Authority, a sovereign wealth fund with assets of more than $500 billion.

He posed the question to Alaska Gov. Mike Dunleavy. Dunleavy stopped short of comparing the melting of Arctic sea ice to the Alaska gold rush. But he encouraged the audience to consider the investment potential in the state.

Dunleavy suggested Alaska is uniquely positioned to benefit from a new trade route in the Arctic.

“That’s something people in this room and this world should think about,” Dunleavy said. “Because we need to build infrastructure in that area. We need to start to develop that area in anticipation of what’s going to happen.”

Earlier in the discussion, Dunleavy mentioned there are vast resources in Alaska “barely being touched.”

He added that the Trump administration has been very pro-development.

“I’d say, take a look at Alaska for a whole host of reasons. We have our traditional resources. We’re a new state,” Dunleavy said. “So imagine America, in some respects, 100 years ago.”

A big topic of conversation at the forum this week was digital disruption: machine learning and the use of personal data.

It’s something sovereign wealth funds try to key into: How will this disruption shape the market, and what are the investment opportunities?

In Alaska, you could say the climate is being disrupted. The Arctic is warming twice as fast as the rest of the world.

“At the same time, retreating glaciers leave behind access to great mineral wealth and the potential for new resource development,” said Angela Rodell, the CEO of the Alaska Permanent Fund Corp., speaking on the panel.

After the session, Rodell said this forum is one of the ways sovereign funds get ideas for where to invest.

“Being on the ground, talking to the people who live and work in a region, nothing beats that for creating a sense of happening, possibility, opportunity, trust,” Rodell said.

Next year, the Alaska Permanent Fund Corp. will have a 5,000-mile-plus commute to attend the conference.

It’s happening in Baku, the capital city of Azerbaijan.

Editor’s note: KTOO is under contract with the Alaska Permanent Fund Corp. to produce video coverage for this event.

 

Think of the tools a doctor needs to assess your health or treat you for disease or injury. Broadband may not have been at the top of the list.

But for rural Alaska, broadband internet service is vital for health care delivery, despite sometimes-tenuous links in the chain that allows health care to function far from the road system.

Take St. Mary’s in the Yukon Delta.

Gail Alstrom points out the sights while bumping along a gravel road in an extended-cab pickup.

“So this is St. Mary’s, and we have about 550 people here,” she told a group of visitors. “The clinic is there on the hill.”

Alstrom is the operations manager at the St. Mary’s Sub-Regional Clinic, part of the Yukon Kuskokwim Health Corp. The clinic has 30 employees and serves a population of 3,000 including surrounding villages, each of which has its own, much smaller clinic.

All of them need a reliable broadband connection.

“When things go down, which seems to be a lot, we have to revert back to what we call downtime procedures,” Alstrom said.

It used to be that downtime mostly disrupted telemedicine, like video appointments and remote consultations. But now, even routine visits at rural clinics require broadband service to access the patients’ electronic health records. Alstrom is reminded of it every time an internet outage throws them back in time to the 20th century.

“When our subregional clinic opened, everything was paper. You documented your (patient’s visit) on paper. And then you faxed it. And then you waited. And then you called to make sure it was there, ” she said. “And then you re-faxed it because it probably didn’t make it.”

Alstrom said internet service in St. Mary’s is getting better.

“I think the last real outage spanned about three or four days,” she said. “No internet, no cell phones.”

For a town that’s not on a fiber-optic line, St. Mary’s is relatively fortunate. It’s one of 84 communities on GCI’s TERRA network, a system that draws from fiber-optic and, through a network of towers and mountaintop repeaters, beams broadband into villages on microwaves.

Stewart Ferguson, chief technology officer for the Alaska Native Tribal Health Consortium, said GCI’s system is a big advancement for clinics, particularly in Western Alaska where it’s most prevalent.

“Because of that, that lets us come into villages and do more video, do more telehealth and actually put in electronic health records,” he said, adding that electronic records are becoming essential for patient care.

“It’s where we can look at their history, their allergies, their meds. It’s where we prescribe for them. It’s how we do medical orders. It’s how we can make referrals to the next level care. It’s how we do consultations,” he said. “We can’t almost imagine doing health care without having these modern tools.”

Yet a handful of clinics in Alaska’s tribal health system still get their internet via old-fashioned satellite, and they aren’t able to make the switch to electronic health records — satellite internet is just too slow.

But Ferguson believes the next big thing in Alaska broadband will be … satellites. Specifically, low Earth orbit satellites that will be smaller than the traditional kind and thousands of miles closer.

“The promise is that these will start to appear over Alaska in the next one to two years,” Ferguson said. “And that’s a game changer. Because then you can have high-speed, hopefully low-cost bandwidths, without this latency.”

It could provide the link that finally brings the smallest and most remote Alaska clinics up to speed.

The U.S. House of Representatives voted Thursday to close the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to oil development.

But, as Alaska Congressman Don Young pointed out, there’s almost no chance the Senate will pass it.

“You’re wasting our time,” the Republican representative told drilling opponents during the floor debate. “It will not go anywhere. That’s why I’m not going to get really excited and go over there and — never mind.”

The vote, though, shows House Democrats are still trying to slow the Trump administration’s momentum on bringing industrial development to the refuge in northeastern Alaska.

There were 225 members who voted to block oil development in the refuge, while 193 voted against the bill. Four Republicans crossed the aisle to vote “yes.” Five Democrats were among the “no” votes.

So far, it’s produced no sign of a pause from the Trump administration. A few hours after the House vote, the Bureau of Land Management released its final environmental report on oil leasing in the refuge. Officials said they plan to hold the first ANWR lease sale by the end of the year.

On Thursday, President Donald Trump’s administration took one of the last steps to allow oil drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.

The U.S. Interior Department has released its final environmental analysis for oil lease sales in the northernmost 1.6 million acres of the refuge, known as the coastal plain. The agency is expected to sign a final decision on oil leasing in the refuge in roughly 30 days.

In its final environmental impact statement, the agency selected a preferred option that would give oil companies the chance to express interest in close to the entirety of the refuge’s coastal plain.

Interior had proposed alternatives with tighter restrictions, including one that would put hundreds of thousands of acres off limits to help protect caribou habitat.

Still, during a call with reporters, Bureau of Land Management Alaska State Director Chad Padgett said he believes the agency’s preferred choice would strike the right balance between economic development and protecting the environment.

“I’m confident that we are on track to do what Congress has asked us to do in a safe and balanced way, that advances the president’s goals of job creation and energy independence with the minimal impact to the area,” Padgett said.

There are restrictions to how oil companies can develop in the area under the preferred alternative, including limitations on how much surface area can be covered by infrastructure.

But environmental groups immediately condemned Interior’s analysis, calling it a “sham.”

In an interview, Susan Culliney with Audubon Alaska said she isn’t surprised the Trump administration’s preference is to try to maximize the amount of land available for oil leasing.

“No matter how you cut it, we don’t think oil drilling belongs in the Arctic Refuge, but this is a particularly bad way to do it,” Culliney said.

The issue has long been hugely controversial, and following Congress’ vote to allow drilling in the refuge in 2017, Interior’s push to make it happen has been tumultuous.

An effort to allow early-stage oil exploration in the refuge last winter stalled. Joe Balash, the Interior official spearheading the effort to hold a lease sale, recently left the Trump administration to take a job at an oil company.

And Thursday, the U.S. House of Representatives passed a bill that would once again block oil development in ANWR. That legislation is largely symbolic, as it has little chance of passing the Republican-led Senate. Still, it sends a strong signal regarding Democrats’ position on drilling in the refuge ahead of next year’s presidential election.

Alaska’s political leaders condemned the House bill and praised the release of the environmental review.

“I’m hopeful we can now move to a lease sale in the very near future, just as Congress intended, so that we can continue to strengthen our economy, our energy security, and our long-term prosperity,” said Sen. Lisa Murkowski, R-Alaska, who played a pivotal role in passing the legislation that allowed for oil development in ANWR.

Arctic Slope Regional Corp., an Alaska Native corporation with a significant stake in potential oil development on the coastal plain, also welcomed the release.

“We are encouraged the Department heard our voices and incorporated our concerns into the final EIS. We look forward to a successful lease sale and strongly believe exploration and production can incorporate cultural and environmental protections while providing for the nation’s energy security,” ASRC said in a statement.

Neets’aii Gwich’in leaders from Alaska Native communities south of the refuge, who have long opposed drilling there, accused the Interior Department of downplaying potential impacts.

“Any impacts to the Porcupine Caribou Herd from changes in migration patterns, lower fertility rates, and loss of habitat will have significant adverse social, cultural, spiritual, and subsistence impacts on our people,” Native Village of Venetie First Chief Margorie Gemmill said in a statement. “This process must be stopped.”

With the release of the final environmental review, leaders at Trump’s Interior Department reiterated that they aim to let oil companies bid on land in ANWR’s coastal plain before the end of the year.

This story has been updated.

Marine vessels of all sizes are transiting through the Arctic Ocean this season, some starting from Nome. And they have a couple of options for ice-free routes.

According to the National Snow and Ice Data Center, or NSIDC, Arctic sea ice loss will likely continue for several weeks.

The center says as of Aug. 31, sea ice extent dropped to the third-lowest amount on satellite record for that day: 1.78 million square miles. Around that same time, sea ice concentrations within the Northwest Passage were tracking below the average recorded between 1981-2010.

Mark Serreze, the director of NSIDC, said at least part of the passage seems to be quite navigable.

“When you think about the Northwest Passage, it’s not just one passage. It’s actually a number of ways you can get through those islands in the Canadian Arctic Archipelago, and if you were a real deep-draft ship, you’d want to go through this northern passage, kind of north of Banks Island, but that still has a lot of ice in it,” he said. “It looks very unlikely that that’s going to open up this year. The southern route through the Northwest Passage looks to be pretty much clear sailing.”

For the northern route through the passage, NSIDC said ice coverage is slightly below the previous, 30-year average, while the southern route — the path Roald Amundsen took through the Northwest Passage — is well below the average ice extent and is expected to be completely clear in the coming weeks.

This would allow polar adventurers Børge Ousland and Mike Horn, who were in Nome recently aboard the sailboat Pangaea, to travel further into the Arctic Ocean before hitting ice.

According to Horn, their journey will include skiing and walking across the frozen Arctic Ocean directly to the North Pole, then end near the Norwegian archipelago of Svalbard, which could take months to complete.

“Our time in Nome was spent fixing the boat, getting the equipment for the Arctic crossing ready, and meeting up with friends,” he said. “The friends I have in Nome went out of their way to help us as much as they could. Really without them, an expedition like this couldn’t happen, because they make things happen.”

Horn has had some equipment issues thus far on his trip, and he reportedly made unplanned stops in Teller and Wales to pick up new water pumps last week.

Going parallel across the opposite side of the Arctic, in a little more luxurious fashion, is the European cruise ship the Silver Explorer. The Silver Explorer started from Nome in early August and sailed through the Northeast Passage, also referred to as the Northern Sea Route, with an escort from a Russian icebreaker. According to Silversea Expeditions, the vessel arrived into Tromsø, Norway, more than three weeks after leaving Nome.

According to the Canadian Coast Guard, more than 15 international cruise ships will attempt at least part of the Northwest Passage this season, including the MV Roald Amundsen. Norwegian company Hurtigruten seeks to have the Amundsen be the first hybrid vessel to traverse the Arctic route later this month.

The Roald Amundsen is expected to end its journey in Nome on Sept. 11. Serreze cautions any vessel attempting to sail through the Northwest Passage right now to be vigilant.

A leaked internal email brings uncertainty to how many of BP Alaska’s employees will retain their jobs, following the $5.6 billion dollar deal to sell all the company’s assets in the state to Hilcorp.

In the email, sent after the deal was made public, BP Alaska President Janet Weiss told employees they have three options.

First, they can apply for jobs with BP outside Alaska.

Second, they can request to leave BP with a severance package.

The third option for BP Alaska employees is to apply for a job with Hilcorp.

“We have designed the sale to give our employees as many options as possible,” Weiss said in the email.

She added, “it is an understatement to say this is a hard day for all of us.”

The email was obtained by Alaska Public Media and first made public by the Alaska Landmine, a political blog.

BP Alaska spokesperson Megan Baldino confirmed the email’s legitimacy on Wednesday evening.

BP does employ union workers on the North Slope, and it is unclear if they have additional options.

The email states BP employees will continue to operate Prudhoe Bay for the next 6-12 months, before the sale gets final state and federal approvals.