Nuiqsut Village tapping backyard power.

• Author: O'Donoghue, Brian Patrick
• Position: Alaska

This small village may benefit from natural gas piped in from nearby Alpine.

It's not exactly free, but natural gas from Arco Alaska's Alpine project could blaze a new trail for other power-starved Bush communities to follow.

Lease agreements at Alpine, an oil field under development between the Coleville River and the National Petroleum Reserve-Alaska, provide for the nearby Inupiat village of Nuiqsut to draw up to 500,000 cubic feet of natural gas each day.

There's a catch, of course. The co-owners of the new field, Arco and Annadarko Petroleum, don't want to get involved in operating a utility. So the village has to take its gas at the well head, located roughly 14 miles from Nuiqsut.

Delivering that gas to the village's residents will cost an estimated $10 million, according to the North Slope Borough, which is overseeing construction of the necessary gas line, a local distribution system, as well as the power conversions for village electrical and heating systems.

"It's not going to be free energy for local residents," noted Richard Glenn, energy director for the North Slope Borough. "Once the infrastructure is in place, we'll be trying to recover the costs of operating the system. We still believe it will be less costly than diesel."

Nuiqsut villagers currently pay $1.50 a gallon for home heating oil. That price tag only reflects the cost of local fuel deliveries. According to Glenn, subsidy programs from the North Slope Borough and the state make it difficult to peg the real cost of energy in the remote village, a few miles south of the Arctic coast along the Coleville. "I can tell you Nuiqsut is one of our most expensive communities," he said.

Alpine, like most oilfields, is expected to yield natural gas along with its crude. Usually a tiny portion of that gas is used to power field operations, with the balance re-injected to push more oil from the ground. During land lease negotiations that continued the better part of a decade, Kuukpik, the village's corporation, Arctic Slope Regional Corp., and the North Slope Borough pressed producers to share a portion of that gas with Nuiqsut.

Alpine's primary developer is now betting there will be plenty of fuel to go around. "It's something we're pleased to be able to do," observed Arco Alaska spokesman Rome Chappell.

The spirit of accommodation extends to allowing Nuiqsut's pipeline to piggy back more than half its 14-mile length using Alpine's vertical pipeline supports. Work began in late...