Northwest Alaska minerals potential: transportation needed for a century of development.

• Author: Metzger, Andrew T.
• Position: SPECIAL SECTION: Mining

During the last several years, various media outlets in Alaska have been rife with discussion of the potential for economic development in the US Arctic, which is essentially northern Alaska. Much of this discussion has been tied to opportunities for resource development and has included numerous policy forums on development and the impact it will have on Alaska's environment, people, and economy. Infrastructure is pervasive in all of these discussions, and there is much conjecture on exactly what should be built where. Topics raised in brainstorming sessions include the need for an Arctic port (or several of them), building roads to resources, the possibility of Adak as a gateway to the Arctic, ardent pleas for a new icebreaker (or a few), and the list goes on.

This leads to examining the pivotal question: "What should be built where?" It's important to construct a framework for an objective assessment of what infrastructure will be needed where for a given development scenario, given that there is such vast resource potential in northwest Alaska.

Resources

The North Slope holds a vast amount of resources, including the following:

* Chukchi offshore lease area (oil, gas)

* Northern Alaska-Slope Coal Province (coal: bituminous, subbituminous)

* The Ambler District (copper, zinc, lead, gold, silver)

* Red Dog Mine (zinc, lead, silver)

* Lost River prospect (fluorspar (fluorite), tin, tungsten)

* Graphite Creek (large flake graphite)

Coal

A truly vast (inferred) supply of coal is located in the Northern Alaska-Slope Coal Province-over 120 billion tons of bituminous and subbituminous coal by one study--so much so that for a developer, given the ton/ year rates, mining all the coal in even one hundred years is unrealistic. The disparity in value between bituminous and sub-bituminous coal is significant. Omitting the sub bituminous coal reduces the development tonnage to about 19 billion tons of the highest quality coal in the Northern Alaska-Slope Coal Province. (There is also coal located at Kobuk, unaccounted for in this figure, known to be bituminous coal of significant quality; it was omitted from this discussion due to lack of information about the deposit.) Based on production rates in Australia, an indicator of what can be achieved with respect to production rates, and the limitations of transportation infrastructure that could be built in this region, a theoretical target production rate of between 400,000 and 240,000 tons per day (about 132 million and 77 million tons per year, based on a 330 day production year) could be expected. This extends the development horizon for the inferred bituminous coal deposit from the Northern Alaska-Slope Coal Province to about 150 to 250 years, respectively.

Crude Oil and Natural Gas

Despite the recent, and drastic, change in the position of Royal Dutch Shell, the fact remains that a 2006 assessment by the Minerals Management Service, now known as the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management and the Bureau of Safety and Environmental Enforcement, in the Chukchi Offshore Lease area there are 15.38 billion barrels of oil and 76.77 trillion mcf (thousand cubic feet) of gas that are technically recoverable, figures which are...