Western Alaska deep-water port potential: Nome, Port Clarence, Cape Blossom all viable locations.

• Author: Stricker, Julie
• Position: TRANSPORTATION

In the 1800s, the western coast of Alaska was a relatively busy place during the ice-free months as hundreds of whaling ships sailed through the Bering Strait in pursuit of whales. Explorers searching for the Northwest Passage made their way along the coast, while the Western Union Telegraph Expedition's Scientific Corps established at camp at Port Clarence on the Seward Peninsula. The gold rushes in the Klondike, Interior Alaska, and Nome brought hordes of stampeders to the region.

In the decades since then, Alaska's western coast has been quiet. Only a handful of small communities dot the coastline, which stretches more than 3,600 miles from Bethel to the Canadian border. Compare that with the US East Coast, which measures a mere 2,069 miles from Maine to Key West.

The next decades may bring significant change as eyes turn toward the Arctic, which is becoming more accessible for shipping, oil and mineral exploration, and tourism as the climate warms and the ice pack melts. Currently, only limited infrastructure is available, but officials on the federal, state, and local levels are advancing a number of port development plans, among them projects in Nome, Port Clarence, and Kotzebue.

The port projects would meet several needs in the region, says Michael Lushkin, a ports and harbor engineer with the Alaska Department of Transportation and Public Facilities (DOT&PF).

"They start from the very high level of maintaining US sovereignty in the Arctic to economic needs, search and rescue, protecting the borders--land, air, and sea borders--of the United States," Lushkin says.

Deep-Draft Vessels Need Deep-Water Ports

Chief among the needs is a deep-water port. Deep-draft vessels can tie up in Anchorage, Seward, Valdez, Kodiak, Unalaska, and Homer but nowhere near the communities along Alaska's Arctic coastline. The US Corps of Engineers has been looking for solutions for several years.

"We looked at several sites along Western Alaska as part of this joint project, all the way from the Canadian/US border down to St. Matthews Island, up to and including Bethel. We covered quite a large area," Lushkin says. "We concentrated in the Nome, Port Clarence, and Teller area for the first part. There are a lot of things happening."

The Corps published a study in November 2013 noting, "Increased vessel traffic coupled with limited marine infrastructure along Alaska's Western and Northern shores poses risks for accidents and incidents, increases response times for Search and Rescue, and requires international coordination." The Alaska Deep-Draft Arctic Ports Navigation Feasibility Study of Alaska and the New Maritime Arctic looked at fourteen sites along the coastline during the three-year study. Although Corps recommends infrastructure improvements at all of them, it singled out the city of Nome and Port Clarence to the northwest for further study. Cape Blossom, outside Kotzebue, is the site of another proposed deep-water port.

The Corps of Engineers plans to release its findings in the first quarter of 2015, says Bruce Sexauer, chief of the Civil Works branch of the Alaska Corps of Engineers. However, he says the Corps has tentatively approved a proposal that focuses on the facilities in Nome.

"Nome already has an existing port structure that can be expanded...