State halts industrial road to Ambler Mining District: $400 million, 220-mile project crucial for NovaCopper's plans.

• Author: Stricker, Julie
• Position: SPECIAL SECTION: Building Alaska

In the 1960s, prospectors discovered a huge trove of buried mineral wealth in the middle Kobuk River valley in Northwestern Alaska. Over the next several decades, they identified rich deposits of copper, gold, zinc, and lead. At least two sites, called Arctic and Bornite, show promise as major mines.

A major hurdle to mine development is the remoteness of the Ambler Mining District, a seventy-five-mile-long band of mineralization that encompasses the Arctic and Bornite sites, as well as many other mineral deposits. The region is sparsely populated and the only access is by boat, plane, or snowmachine.

A road is necessary for mineral development in the region, says Rick Van Nieuwenhuyse, president and CEO of NovaCopper, which is working with NANA Regional Corporation to develop the Arctic and Bornite deposits.

"Our base assumption is were working off of a road," Van Nieuwenhuyse says. "Right now, there's nothing that I can point to that says we can do something else. If there were and it was economic, we'd certainly be doing it."

A New Rural Road

But in rural Alaska, building a road means more than just finding the most efficient way to travel from Point A to Point B. Roads bring change, both good and bad. A road may bring jobs, economic opportunity, and a higher standard of living. It can also disrupt subsistence activities, bring dust, noise, light, and people to formerly untrammeled regions. A road to the Ambler Mining District raises questions on both sides of the issue, which residents have aired in a series of community and regional public hearings.

The process started decades ago, in the years after the region's mineral wealth became apparent.

The necessity of building a road to access what are now stranded resources was addressed in the Alaska National Interest Lands Conservation Act in 1980, which was cited by the Alaska Industrial Development and Export Authority (AIDEA) in a memo to the governor in 2015. Section 201(4)(b) notes, "Congress finds that there is a need for access for surface transportation purposes across the Western [Kobuk River] unit of the Gates of the Arctic National Preserve [from the Ambler Mining District to the Alaska Pipeline Haul Road] and the Secretary shall permit such access in accordance with the provisions of this subsection."

In 2010, the Alaska Department of Transportation and Public Facilities (DOT&PF) started studying potential road and railroad routes from the Ambler Mining District west to the coast of the Bering Sea and east to the Dalton Highway. The agency settled on a roughly 220-mile corridor east to the Dalton, where vehicles would have access to all-season ports via highway and the Alaska Railroad.

The road corridor, which became one of former Alaska Governor Sean Parnell's "Roads to Resources," has generated both...