Alaska railroad LNG transport: trial run carries groundbreaking cargo.

• Author: Stricker, Julie
• Position: TRANSPORTATION

As snowflakes fell on a late-September morning, an Alaska Railroad freight train pulled in to the Fairbanks station. Although it was one of the railroad's five regularly scheduled freight trains to the Interior city, this train also carried some groundbreaking cargo. Among the cars carrying coal, fuel, pipe, and consumer goods were two forty-foot-long gray cylinders with bright red letters spelling out LNG.

It was the conclusion of the first-ever shipment of liquefied natural gas (LNG) by rail in the United States, part of a long-term effort to provide Fairbanks residents with easy, affordable access to the relatively inexpensive, clean-burning fuel. Hitachi High-Tech AW Cryo of Vancouver, Canada, loaned the containers to the railroad for the demonstration.

"It is a feather in the cap for the Alaska Railroad to be the first railroad in the country to do this," railroad spokesman Tim Sullivan says.

Rail Efficiency

The railroad started planning to move LNG several years ago, receiving the unprecedented two-year permit from the Federal Rail Administration in October 2015 after an arduous permitting process. Although LNG is regularly transported by rail in Europe and Japan, it has never been allowed on a US railroad, until now.

"I know I've said this a couple of times, but we're pretty proud of this," Sullivan says. "We're pretty proud of the opportunity, and we think we can take this opportunity and run with it. We're hopeful that the folks at Titan and FNG [Fairbanks Natural Gas] will see this as a good opportunity maybe as well. We think it's good for the railroad. We think it's good for the Interior. We think it's good for the state in general."

The cryogenic containers can hold about 27,546 pounds, equivalent to 7,024 gallons, of LNG apiece. The railroad plans to transport two containers twice a week during the four-week demonstration project. If FNG agrees to use the railroad to ship LNG, the tank cars would supplement or replace the fleet of trucks now used to bring LNG to the Interior city from the Titan LNG plant at Point Mackenzie.

"The goal is to show the people who are currently moving LNG by truck that we can do it very efficiently by rail," Sullivan says. "It's a good way to move it and maybe it's an opportunity for them and for Interior Alaska to get LNG here cheaply and efficiently."

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