Alaska's arctic fleet: vessels and barges have short season.

• Author: Stricker, Julie
• Position: SPECIAL SECTION: Arctic Oil & Gas

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The village of Point Lay is located about midway between Kotzebue and Barrow on Alaska's Chukchi Sea coast. The community of about 274 residents is protected from the Chukchi by Kasugaluk Lagoon. The lagoon, coupled with unpredictable weather and sea ice, can also be a barrier to vessels and barges carrying precious fuel and cargo for the residents.

In 2015, it took Crowley Marine thirty days to deliver a year's worth of fuel to the storage tanks at Point Lay instead of the normal ten to twelve days with good weather. That's an eternity when the seas are only ice-free for a few weeks. Typically, Crowley uses two coastal tug/barge sets and two "lagoon barges" to shuttle more than one hundred loads of fuel across the lagoon, says Sean Thomas, vice president for Crowley Marine.

"That many fuel transfers create risk," Thomas says in early August.

This year, the Crowley team took a new tack. They used a specialized floating fuel hose and anchoring system to run approximately seven thousand feet of hose from the coastal barges, across the lagoon, and to the community tanks onshore, he says.

"The delivery was approximately seven hundred thousand gallons of fuel and it was completed safely, without incident, in less than seventy-two hours," Thomas says.

"That's a huge improvement, and when you're working in the Arctic, any time you can save is worth its weight in gold because the weather is fickle, the infrastructure is nonexistent, and there's the ever-present threat of ice."

Short Season

The season lasts only a couple of months, starting in early August. During that window, nearly all the fuel and cargo that can't feasibly be transported by air is delivered by barge. Only a handful of companies send vessels into the region, which lacks ports and other marine-based infrastructure, but is home to one of the world's largest zinc mines and Alaska's North Slope oilfields.

Crowley is the only company that delivers fuel to Alaska villages along the Arctic coastline, Thomas says. Bowhead Transport Company, owned by Ukpeagvik Inupiat Corporation (UIC), the village corporation for Barrow, is the only scheduled barge service to and among the seven communities on the North Slope, including Barrow and Prudhoe Bay. Bowhead also directly links North Slope villages with Seattle. It has a joint operating agreement with Crowley Marine for cargo deliveries.

Several other companies, notably Alaska Marine Lines and Alaska Logistics, deliver...