Arctic Alternatives: Multiple roads to Alaska's energy future.

• Author: O'Hanley, Tara

"The only reason we're an Arctic nation is because of Alaska," observes Givey Kochanowski, senior advisor to the US Department of Energy's Arctic Energy Office.

"Wherever you are with political ideology, there's an argument why Alaska matters" in conversations about energy, he continues, "If you're environmentally focused, climate change is happening twice as fast in the Arctic as the rest of the world. If you're more focused on Alaska's untapped resources for domestic energy supply, you're thinking those resources would be tremendous for our national security, because energy security is national security."

Since the 70s, conversations about US Arctic energy have been dominated by oil and gas. The importance, or even possibility, of diversification of energy sources often gets lost amid that noise at the state level. Whether due to a lack of motivation when Alaska's petroleum revenues are fleetingly high or due to a crippling lack of agency when revenues drop, the net effect over time is that projects end up with a false start or-too often-no start at all.

In short, at the federal level it's all too possible that the public doesn't know what they're missing when it comes to the Arctic, and at the state level, policymakers are so busy holding on to one cookie that they tend to neglect other items available at the buffet.

"These are tough issues," Kochanowski says. "Energy cuts across every sector of the economy... and nobody has a 100 percent solution to what to do."

What would a more diverse, multifaceted energy industry in Alaska look like? How can the state apply lessons learned from resource bonanzas in the past to property seize opportunities in the future? What projects are worth risking investment? And how can Alaska stakeholders work with private industry to move projects forward in a way that will provide a more solid foundation to the state's future, regardless of federal policy?

As is so often the case, the answers to these guestions are, in a word, complicated.

Carbon Monetization

A major pivot in Alaska's resource policy occurred in December. Governor Mike Dunleavy, following up on discussions at his first annual Sustainable Energy Conference in May 2022, announced a bill to monetize the state's capacity for carbon capture and sequestration. Instead of (or rather, in addition to) pulling carbon out of the ground in the form of fossil fuels, Alaska could see carbon dioxide reinjected into underground reservoirs, isolating the heat-trapping gas from the atmosphere. Or simply by leaving forest areas untouched, the plant biomsss absorbs carbon dioxide.

Alaska Native corporations--including Ahtna, Chugach Alaska, and Sealaska--have been successfully developing carbon sequestration for several years, using forested tribal land as assets for...