Energy & Mining

Alaska’s most populous corridor can generate most of its electricity through renewable energy, but would require significant upfront capital investment, a University of Alaska Fairbanks team said in a new report.

The report, issued last week by UAF’s Alaska Center for Energy and Power, found that by 2050 non-fossil energy can supply anywhere from 70% to 96% of the power needed to produce electricity along the Railbelt. The region comprises communities from Fairbanks in the Interior to Seward on the Kenai Peninsula, the corridor along the Alaska Railroad line that hold the vast majority of the state’s population.

The report compared four scenarios for power generation, from a continuation of the current heavy reliance on natural gas to varying blends of solar, wind, hydro, tidal and nuclear energy.

Under the business-as-usual scenario, with continued use of existing power plants, some new fossil fuel units and continued use of wind and solar energy at current rates, renewables would supply 11% of energy to generate electricity, and required capital investment would be $2.3 billion.

The other scenarios would require much more investment: $7.7 billion for a mix integrating tidal power, wind and solar to achieve 70% renewable energy; $10.1 billion for a mix of wind, solar and small modular nuclear reactions to achieve 96% zero-carbon generation; and $11.8 billion for a mixture of large-scale hydro, wind and solar projects to achieve 88% renewable energy.

Findings were presented Friday during a meeting of the state Senate Resources Committee.

One takeaway from the report is that wind and solar are consistently the cheapest forms of energy, but that they have quantity limits, said Jeremy VanderMeer, a research assistant professor at ACEP and one of the report authors.

For that reason, there is a need to mix in hydropower, continued fossil fuel use, batteries or some combination of those, VanderMeer told the committee.

“You need firm sources or power. Firm just means you can rely on it to supply power whenever you need it,” he said.

Investment would target improvements in power transmission through the Railbelt communities, said Derek Stenclik, founding partner of Telos Energy, a company that specializes in isolated energy systems. Stenclik was a report coauthor.

“Transmission is really a key enabler for all of these portfolios,” Stenclik told the committee. Battery storage is another “key enabler,” and something that would prevent interruptions or blackouts, he said.

While the need to invest $10 billion or so may seem daunting, that capital investment can be offset by future savings in annual operations costs, Steve Colt, an ACEP research professor and a report coauthor, told the committee.

“If we were able to make that kind of investment, we would have to pay a lot of money for capital, but we would potentially save three quarters of a billion dollars of fuel costs every year,” Colt told the senators. “So to me, that helps put in perspective the daunting challenge of investing maybe $10 billion, that you could save something approaching $1 billion every year for as long as the equipment operates.”

In the long term, costs of the four different scenarios evaluated in the report were largely equal, he said.

There is pending legislation that would address some of the needs described in the report.

In response to a question from Sen. Matt Claman, D-Anchorage, Stenclik said that legislation to establish a renewable energy portfolio standard, or RPS, would probably be helpful and could be important for the Railbelt.

He pointed to experience in the Lower 48, where plant development may be economically justified but where “having that RPS or having that policy backing provides the certainty to the investors and the certainty to the market to bring it to fruition,” he said, pointing to his experience in the Lower 48.

“I do think a lot of the projects would be economic in their own right today. But I think it does provide that certainty and the scaffolding that we can start using to build out a roadmap,” he said.

There are two pending versions of that legislation, House Bill 121 and Senate Bill 101, but neither made it to the House or Senate floor last year.

Additionally, said resources committee Co-Chair Cathy Giessel, R-Anchorage, legislation is in the works to help upgrade the transmission system.

Work on the report started in 2022. It was funded by the federal government through the Office of Naval Research and by the state, ACEP said. Railbelt utilities and the Alaska Energy Authority helped in the research, and Telos provided modeling and analysis support, ACEP said.

This story originally appeared in the Alaska Beacon and is republished here with permission.

North Slope oil production is projected to rise significantly in the next decade, according to a state production forecast presented to lawmakers on Wednesday.

Oil production has been flat or declining over the past five years. In the short term, it’s expected to stay fairly stable at roughly 480,000 barrels per day through mid-2025. But the commissioner of Alaska’s Department of Natural Resources, John Boyle, told lawmakers Wednesday that he expects a more than 30% increase by the start of the 2033 fiscal year in mid-2032.

“We are realizing currently a major boom in investment, and I think it’s safe to say that we really are starting a new chapter when it comes to the future of the North Slope and the types of operators that we’re seeing up there,” Boyle told the Senate Finance Committee.

Boyle said he expects major projects like ConocoPhillips’ Willow and Santos’ Pikka to drive much of the growth. The state’s forecast anticipates production exceeding 630,000 barrels per day by 2032. Pikka is expected to start production in 2026, with Willow following in 2029.

Boyle said he’s also encouraged to see a returning oil producer, Apache partnering with Armstrong to drill three wells on the eastern portion of the North Slope

By the end of the decade, Boyle expects existing fields like Prudhoe Bay to make up a minority of the oil flowing through the trans-Alaska pipeline.

Sen. Bert Stedman, a Sitka Republican and co-chair of the Senate Finance Committee, welcomed the forecast.

“Things look a lot brighter, especially with all the national headwinds on oil and gas. We’ve done well, relatively speaking, with what we have to deal with, so we do have a bright future in our oil basin,” Stedman said.

The state also offers high-end and low-end forecasts, which diverge significantly. The high-end forecast shows production climbing to nearly a million barrels per day by 2032, and the low-end forecast would have production falling by roughly 20% over that same period. For the past year, production came in roughly 3% lower than the state’s forecast.

The U.S. Supreme Court on Monday rejected the state of Alaska’s request to consider its arguments for overturning a Biden administration decision that bars development of the controversial Pebble mine project.

The court, in a single line on a list of orders, denied the state’s attempt to bring the case directly to it without pursuing the complaint through the lower courts.

The administration of Gov. Mike Dunleavy had made the unusual request for direct Supreme Court deliberation in a petition filed in July.

The administration argued that the Environmental Protection Agency’s Jan. 30, 2023, determination blocking permitting of the Pebble project violated the state’s rights and would deprive the state of resource income.

Alaska Attorney General Treg Taylor, in a statement Monday, referred to those arguments.

“The EPA set a dangerous precedent when it issued a preliminary veto of a project on State land. I swore an oath to uphold Alaska’s Constitution, which requires developing and conserving all of Alaska’s natural resources for the maximum benefit of its people. Due to the national significance of the EPA’s veto, we went to the Supreme Court directly asking it to take up this case so the issue can be resolved as quickly as possible,” Taylor said in the statement.

The state will file its complaint elsewhere, Taylor continued.

“While SCOTUS did not pick up the case at this time, it does not indicate how the Supreme Court will ultimately rule on the merits. All this decision means is that we will take the more traditional route and file first in the federal district court. We will continue fighting for Alaska’s right to develop its resources through the federal court system,” he said in the statement.

Alaska Native, conservation and fishing groups that oppose the Pebble project welcomed the Supreme Court’s rejection but expressed worries about the state’s continued efforts to overturn EPA’s protections for the Bristol Bay region.

“Although we are glad to see the Supreme Court refuse to entertain Governor Dunleavy’s frivolous lawsuit challenging the EPA’s Clean Water Act veto of the Pebble Mine, we should have never gotten to this point in the first place,” Delores Larson, interim executive director of United Tribes of Bristol Bay, said in a statement. “Governor Dunleavy’s lawsuit was – and will continue to be – a massive waste of taxpayer money that only represents the interests of the company behind the Pebble Mine. The Tribes, fishermen, and local communities were just celebrating the EPA’s Clean Water Act protections for Bristol Bay, just to be thrown back into uncertainty less than a year later.”

The Bristol Bay Regional Seafood Development Association, another group opposed to the mine, also released a statement criticizing the Dunleavy administration’s legal move.

“While we are relieved and happy to see the Supreme Court dismiss Governor Dunleavy’s unreasoned attempt to challenge the EPA’s Clean Water Act veto of the Pebble Mine, as an Alaskan fisherman I am concerned about the amount of public money that was wasted to push this frivolous case,” Mark Niver, a board member of the commercial fishing association, said in the statement. “Unfortunately we know that this is not the end of the attacks on Bristol Bay and we will not stop working to defend our irreplaceable fishery. We need our elected officials to work with us to pass legislation to permanently protect Bristol Bay and all that the watershed supports in order to end the uncertainty that’s loomed over us for decades.”

The proposed Pebble mine would be a huge open-pit copper and gold project located in the uplands of the Bristol Bay watershed. The Bristol Bay region holds the world’s largest sockeye salmon runs, supporting major commercial, subsistence and sport fisheries. Broad opposition to the mine focused on anticipated impacts to Bristol Bay salmon and the people and wildlife that depend on it.

To pursue the Pebble argument at the Supreme Court, the Dunleavy administration used a Virginia-based firm that is known for advocating for conservative causes. The firm, Consovoy McCarthy, was first contracted by the Dunleavy administration in 2019 to pursue a legal fight against public employee unions; it later got a $600,00 contract that proved controversial.

Consovoy McCarthy also represents the Dunleavy administration in its legal fight against the federal government rural priority for subsistence fishing in the Kuskokwim River, a place where salmon runs have dwindled. The state’s position dismayed many Native groups, and the Alaska Federation of Natives and others intervened in favor of the federal government’s subsistence management.

In his budget released last month, Dunleavy proposed another $2 million appropriation to the Alaska Department of Law for such “statehood defense” efforts. At the Dec. 14 news conference on the budget, Taylor said the Legislature has already appropriated $11.5 million over the past few years for such efforts, about half of which has been spent. Ultimately, Taylor said then, about $15 million is expected to be spent on those legal fights.

This story originally appeared in the Alaska Beacon and is republished here with permission.

The Gitanyow nation of British Columbia has long relied on two productive salmon streams, known as the Hanna-Tintina creeks, which flow in the Nass watershed. 

But back in 2016, a tribal fisheries report revealed that salmon were changing their spawning habits. 

“We learned that Strohn Creek — which is called Xsik’alaa’n in our language — was actually really productive,” said Naxginkw Tara Marsden, Sustainability Director of the Gitanyow Hereditary Chiefs. “Over 40% of the spawners were in this creek, which historically had not been a producer.”

The nearby creek had not been a salmon habitat because 100 years ago, most of it was covered by a glacier. 

But climate change is rapidly transforming the landscapes of western Canada and Southeast Alaska. With warming fueled by the burning of fossil fuels, many of the region’s glaciers could melt away by the end of the century.

In their wake, they’ll leave thousands of miles of brand new salmon streams. But according to a recent study published in the journal Science last November, those streams may be threatened by resource extraction before the fish even get there. 

By the time salmon were discovered in Xsik’alaa’n, mining companies had already staked claims in the surrounding hillside. And the study finds that much of the region’s new salmon habitat overlaps with a mining hotspot where dozens of claims have already been staked on newly melted land. 

“So we have a choice as to how we steward those nascent ecosystems,” said Jonathan Moore, a researcher at Simon Fraser University who led the study. “Are we going to protect them for future salmon habitat? Or are they going to be mined?”

Moore, Marsden and collaborators from the University of Montana and the Taku River Tlingit First Nation compared maps of glacial retreat and future salmon habitat in the transboundary region of Alaska and Canada against mining claims within a three-mile radius. 

Out of 114 watersheds, they identified 25 watersheds where half the future salmon habitat overlapped with mining claims, and 17 watersheds with more than 90%. 

That’s largely because many of the region’s fast-melting glaciers are within the “Golden Triangle,” a mining hotspot in Canada’s western Stikine region. As the name implies, most of the mining activity there is focused on gold.

And this modern day gold rush is facilitated by the Mineral Tenure Act, a colonial mining law that allows mining companies to get the rights for exploration and development with little consultation and a nominal fee. 

Under this law, mining companies have been able to stake claims on top of glaciers that are still frozen, and on the unceded First Nations land.

If a mining claim develops into a more permanent mine, it’s subject to various environmental assessments and regulations under the Mineral Tenure Act. But those environmental laws do not mandate the consideration of climate change or future habitat. 

“That’s not surprising, given how fast the world is changing and how hard it is to change policy,” Moore said. “But I think there’s an urgent need for environmental laws to look to the future and ask whether they’re protecting future habitats and not just current habitats.”

According to a recent decision by the Supreme Court of British Columbia, the Mineral Tenure Act violates Indigenous constitutional rights to stewardship too.

“The hurdle that gets created when [mining companies] stake their claims, is that then they’re owed something,” Marsden said. “We’ve stewarded these lands for tens of thousands of years, and we’re not owed anything.”

According to the court decision, the mining claims staked under the Mineral Tenure Act undermine the Canadian government’s duty to consult with Tribal nations before approving environmental permits. The province has 18 months to rewrite the Act.

Tribal governments like the Gitanyow Hereditary Chiefs hope that the province will follow their lead. In Gitanyow territory, mining in around the Hanna-Tintina creeks was already banned by the Gitanyow Lax’yip Land Use Plan in 2012.

And in 2021, they extended the same protections to Xsik’alaa’n, Strohn Creek through the declaration of the Wilp Wii Litsxw Meziadin Indigenous Protected Area. 

Though Tribal governments have led the way, the study notes that it’s possible for federal or provincial governments to establish proactive protections too. In the summer of 2023, the U.S. Forest Service established a ban on mining in areas around the retreating Mendenhall Glacier in Juneau. 

State economists are predicting modest job growth in 2024 across Alaska in a new report released Tuesday by the state labor department. Officials anticipate Alaska employers will add some 5,400 jobs, a 1.7% increase.

After substantial job losses in 2020, employment has grown steadily since 2021 at more than 2% per year. Labor department economist Karinne Wiebold, who wrote the report, said in an interview that the slightly weaker forecast for 2024 reflects larger trends.

“Really, the story here is that we’re out of the COVID recovery, big picture, and we’re moving into this new phase where we’re going to be absorbing this infrastructure money that’s been coming from the federal government as part of the Infrastructure (Investment and Jobs) Act, and also the Inflation Reduction Act,” Wiebold said. “Those dollars we expect to start hitting the pavement this year, and that’s going to be one of our primary drivers for growth this coming year.”

Construction is expected to add 1,100 jobs, an increase of 6.7%. Employment in the mining and the oil industry is another bright spot in the forecast, predicted to grow 8.7%, or 1,000 jobs. Economists point to a new gold mine near Tok set to begin production this year and preliminary work expected on the Willow and Pikka oilfields.

But as with any forecast, there’s a lot up in the air. An unexpected national or international recession could put a damper on tourism numbers. Delays on infrastructure projects could push back construction hiring. But the biggest headwind, Wiebold said, is the persistent labor shortage. There are twice as many job openings as unemployed people in the state.

“If we don’t have the people to fill those jobs, then those jobs, in a sense, haven’t been created,” she said. “So that’s really the kind of the wild card: are there going to be the people to fill the jobs in the places and at the times that we need them?”

The report points to two factors making the labor shortage especially acute in Alaska. For one, a large portion of the state’s population is aging into retirement. For another, more working-age people between 18 and 64 years old are leaving the state than moving in — especially young families in their 20s and 30s.

Between 2013 and 2022, the state’s population was essentially flat, losing just about 1,000 people. But over that same period, as the population grew older, the state lost 30,000 working-age adults and 18,000 jobs, according to Wiebold. About 40% of those losses came from the oil and gas industry, according to state economic data.

And Wiebold says even industries like fish processing and tourism that tend to import their workers from out of state could find themselves struggling to hire.

“If we can’t draw some of those out-of-state workers up here this year because they have opportunities that are closer to home, or perhaps that pay more, then we could be struggling to fill jobs in industries that regularly rely on that out-of-state workforce,” she said.

Wiebold cited the labor shortage as one reason that jobs in leisure and hospitality are forecast to grow a modest 1.4% despite cruise ship visitor numbers forecast to reach or exceed last year’s records.

Jobs in manufacturing, finance and the information sector are expected to underperform other industries with zero growth, though none are forecast to shed workers.

The data excludes people who are self-employed, farm workers, domestic workers, unpaid family workers, uniformed military members and most commercial fishermen.

A federal appeals court rejected a motion by environmental and Alaska Native groups that were seeking to block construction of the Willow oil field project, allowing ConocoPhillips to continue with its planned winter work on the huge development on the North Slope.

The 9th Circuit Court of Appeals, in a three-page order issued Monday, denied the motion for an emergency injunction that was filed two weeks ago by the groups that are seeking to overturn the Biden administration’s Willow approval.

The order was issued “without prejudice,” meaning that the larger legal case remains alive, with merits of the arguments for and against development to be evaluated later.

The Willow project, in line to become one of the most prolific oil fields on the North Slope, would tap into an estimated 600 million barrels of recoverable oil and produce up to 180,000 barrels a day, according to ConocoPhillips and federal regulators. That would be a significant boost to North Slope production that has dwindled since its 1988 peak of over 2 million barrels a day. Production in the last fiscal year, which ended June 30, averaged 479,400 barrels per day, according to state officials.

Willow has been the subject of intense controversy. Alaska political and business leaders are championing it as critical to the state’s economy and the North Slope’s future as a long-term oil producer, while environmentalists are blasting it as a polluting “carbon bomb” that threatens to derail U.S. efforts to combat climate change.

For ConocoPhillips, the court order affirmed ongoing plans.

“ConocoPhillips is pleased the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals denied the plaintiffs’ request for an injunction pending appeal. ConocoPhillips is proceeding with Willow construction as we continue to review the court’s decision,” company spokesperson Rebecca Boys said by email on Tuesday.

The company has 800 employees and contractors already assigned to the project, and this winter’s work includes building an ice road, mining and placement of gravel and pipeline construction, Boys said. Activities that do not disturb the surface, such as preparations for the ice road, have already started, as have deliveries of construction materials to a staging area, she said. The surface-disturbing activities like gravel mining and placement are expected to start this month, she said.

Willow opponents, in a statement issued Tuesday, said they will press on with their challenges despite the latest setback.

“It’s disappointing that the court has allowed ConocoPhillips to continue doing construction on the Willow project when there’s ongoing litigation charging the Biden administration with unlawfully approving the project in the first place,” said Bridget Pasrianos, senior staff attorney with the environmental law firm Trustees for Alaska, which is representing the plaintiffs.

“This project was approved despite known harms to the community of Nuiqsut and despite the fact that it will produce huge amounts of greenhouse gases in a region already suffering existential climate impacts like the collapse of fish populations and community infrastructure,” she continued, citing the Inupiat village that is closest to the Willow site. “We will do everything we can to protect the western Arctic and stop Willow in the weeks and months to come.”

The continuing legal fight dates back to 2020, when the plaintiffs successfully challenged the Trump administration’s project approvals. After President Joe Biden was sworn into office, agencies in his administration reevaluated the plan and ultimately approved a project that would be somewhat smaller in scope, winnowing it down to three drill sites rather than the five that were in the Trump-approved plan.

Critics of the project continued to press their legal challenge, but their arguments were ultimately rejected last month by U.S. District Court Judge Sharon Gleason. The plaintiffs appealed Gleason’s decision.

Backers of the project have amicus briefs supporting the Biden administration’s approvals. Briefs have been filed with the appeals court by the state of Alaska, the North Slope Borough and the Native-owned Arctic Slope Regional Corp., as well as by ConocoPhillips. The appeals court, in its latest order, also agreed to accept additional supportive briefs that the Alaska Congressional delegation and Alaska legislature plan to file.

The court set a series of deadlines later this month and in January for the parties to flesh out their arguments. On Tuesday, the court scheduled oral arguments on the matter to be held on Feb. 4 in San Francisco.

Willow, with production expected to start in 2029, would be the farthest-west producing oil field in Arctic Alaska.

Because it is located on federal land, within the National Petroleum Reserve in Alaska, the state would reap much less income from oil produced there than it does from most North Slope oil fields, which are located on state land. The extent to which state revenues would be negatively affected is being reviewed.

This story originally appeared in the Alaska Beacon and is republished here with permission.