Global energy prices increase coal exports from Alaska in 2008: additional coal development could provide economic boost for the state.

• Author: Liles, Patricia
• Position: MINING

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Usibelli Coal Mine announced in mid-September that the Healy-based mining operation would be making additional shipments of coal to Pacific Rim customers in the later part of the year, including trial shipments to two new buyers of the Alaska energy resource.

"World coal demand is high in the face of rising prices for other fuels and Alaska is ideally located to help meet that rising demand," said Joe Usibelli Jr., president of the Healy-based open pit coal mine, in a press release announcing the new export shipments. "We are optimistic these trial shipments will lead to new long-term business relationships that will secure the future for export of Alaska coal."

The three shipments of 70,000 to 80,000 metric tons of coal scheduled to load in Seward onto oceangoing vessels in late 2008 will raise Usibelli's annual export total this year to more than 500,000 metric tons. That's a "... pretty substantial increase from 2007," said Steve Denton, vice president of business development at the mine.

Usibelli, with more than 30 years of reserves identified and additional resources available for expansion, has plenty more coal to share with the nation and other parts of the world.

The mine's annual production of about 1.5 million tons of coal is a drop in the bucket of the vast coal resources known to exist in Alaska, but which remains untapped.

GIANT-SIZED ENERGY SUPPLY

The total of Alaska's known coal resource is estimated to be 5.5 trillion tons, said Paul Metz, director of Mineral Industry Resource Laboratory at the University of Alaska Fairbanks. That amount could supply the current energy demand throughout the United States for at least 1,000 years, if all of the nation's energy consumption was converted to coal.

And that's not an unrealistic option, Metz said, given the technology to convert coal to liquid fuels. "Sixty percent of the nation's electricity is generated with coal," he added.

Included in Alaska's undeveloped coal resources are the Beluga and Chuitna coal fields located near Cook Inlet, about 50 miles west of Anchorage. Those resources are estimated to contain more than 1.5 billion tons of sub-bituminous coal.

Further northwest in Alaska, in a more logistically challenging location, is another giant-sized coal resource located mostly on Native-owned land, and is an energy source with a history of use. Whaling ships in the late 1800s and the early 1990s used coal mined from the Corwin Bluffs and Cape Beaufort...