Building Up North

How well do you know Alaska’s oil and gas industry?

lazers, blouses, and skirts hang on racks, but this isn’t a clothing boutique. In the Enterprise and Entrepreneurship lab at Martin Luther King Jr. Technical High School in Anchorage, students can borrow professional attire for a job interview or presentation. That’s just one way King Tech helps guide students into a career.

Entrepreneurship is a long way from the vocational school King Tech started as in 1974. At that time, shop class was for “hobbyesque” crafts and home economics was, well, for homes, says Kern McGinley, principal of King Tech. Nowadays, auto shop and carpentry are taught alongside nursing, cooking, video production, and, yes, starting a business—all under the umbrella of career and technical education (CTE).

ost of living seems like a simple calculation. Alaskans have an intuitive sense of paying more for necessities than households in the Lower 48 do. Off the road system, stickers that would shock an urban shopper are an everyday feature of store shelves. City dwellers, too, have long known that Alaska is a frontier when it comes to affordability, with extra expenses for home heating and for buying food shipped from Tacoma.

Yet the historic “end of the road” is getting a little closer to market. Despite a jump in the nationwide consumer price index (CPI) of 7.9 percent in the last twelve months, Alaska is a much less expensive state to live in, compared to the Lower 48, than it used to be.

epending on the source, annual revenue for the United States’ commercial furniture market was between $12.3 billion and $12.94 billion in 2020. Given the swift transition offices made to remote work when the COVID-19 pandemic sent the country into lockdown in March 2020, those figures might seem counterintuitive. The logical assumption was that COVID-19 would spell disaster for office furnishings.

It didn’t, and no one is more surprised than John Rafferty, COO of Capital Office in Juneau.

“Going back to when COVID had just hit and everybody goes into lockdown, you would have thought it wasn’t the best time to be in the commercial furniture business,” he says. “But Capital Office has been in business for seventy-five years, and I would say the last two years were our top five in terms of sales revenue.”

eward’s Alutiiq Pride Marine Institute quietly celebrated its 30th anniversary recently, but many residents and even some in the industry are unaware of the pioneering work the shellfish hatchery and mariculture research center has conducted.

Built by the Alaska Department of Fish and Game from criminal settlement funds resulting from the 1989 Exxon Valdez oil spill, the Mariculture Technical Center opened in 1992 with the primary purpose of producing oysters and clams for aquatic farmers.

arvesting our personal food has been something that my family has always done,” says Johon Atkinson, a community wellness specialist in Metlakatla. “We’ve always harvested off the land and been able to fill our freezers with wealth, with investments.”

Atkinson is a full-time harvester of wild resources, in addition to his career in the cash economy. Hunters, fishers, and gatherers harvest an estimated 34 million pounds of wild foods annually, according to the Alaska Department of Fish and Game’s (ADF&G) Division of Subsistence. Those foods provide 25 percent of calorie requirements and more than the entire nutritional requirement for protein in rural communities.

ydrocarbons are a two-edged sword. One edge is hydrogen, storing energy like wound-up springs that is released when combusted with oxygen. The other edge is the carbon atoms the hydrogen is bonded to, which in the grip of oxygen become a climate-warming veil of carbon dioxide gas. Petroleum under the North Slope and methane under Cook Inlet have both potentials: productive energy from hydrogen and destructive pollution from carbon. In a decarbonizing global market, Alaska needs a way to separate the good from the bad.

“If we want to continue to be an energy exporting state, which is very much what we see ourselves as, we need to understand those markets are changing internationally,” says Gwen Holdmann, director of the Alaska Center for Energy and Power (ACEP) at UAF.

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e came so close. For more than forty years, the most enduring cause that Don Young advocated for, as Congressman for All Alaska, was oil and gas development in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR). Before he died in March, Young had seen a president sign legislation authorizing lease sales in ANWR’s coastal plain; he saw a lease sale actually carried out; and he was on the verge of seeing initial exploration toward eventual development.

The first exploration campaign is on hold, pending court action. And Young had one more counterattack in his pocket, a bill to prevent a moratorium on leasing in the refuge: HR 1726, the ANWR Act, which stands for “America Needs Worthwhile Resources.” His last ANWR bill was only the latest, after fourteen previous attempts to open ANWR.

yte by byte, technology is helping the oil and gas industry become more efficient, cost-effective, and safe. Advancements in remote sensing technology and their implementation allow oil and gas companies to collect higher quality data and act more precisely in the field.

“Using remote sensing, you can collect a lot more data a lot faster,” explains Adam McCullough, the Alaska program manager for NV5 Geospatial, which specializes in light detection and ranging (LIDAR) mapping.

The laser-based remote sensing technology—deployed on autonomous vehicles, fixed-wing aircraft, and helicopters—can provide detailed topographic maps, lake-bottom maps, and vegetation data.

he development of oil and gas in the Arctic has been a hot topic for some time, but the reality is that oil produced in Alaska has always primarily come from the North Slope, solidly within the Arctic Circle. However, the majority of oil and gas production in the United States is not within the Arctic, as Alaska is currently the fifth largest oil producing state, following Texas, North Dakota, New Mexico, and Colorado.

Even though the state doesn’t lead US production (which is the current largest producer of oil in the world), Alaska’s location is what includes the United States as one of eight countries with territory in the far north. The others are Canada, Denmark (via Greenland), Finland, Iceland, Norway, Sweden, and Russia. Oil and gas operations in the eight Arctic countries are incredibly varied, ranging from national policies that discourage oil and gas to country-wide efforts to ramp up production. Below are broad overviews of the eight Arctic nation’s relationship with the oil industry.

he Trans Alaska Pipeline System is an iconic image of Alaska and the oil industry. Because many sections of the pipeline are easily accessible and traverse stunning Alaska landscapes, it’s often photographed and is instantly recognizable. In fact, when looking for oil infrastructure images in Alaska, more often than not the challenge is finding an image of anything else.

So Alaskans may be less familiar with other vistas of the state’s oil industry (if that’s the case, make sure to check out “Images of Infrastructure,” a photo essay of Alaska oil field infrastructure we published in October 2021). For Alaska Business, even more rare are opportunities to look at oil and gas operations around the world.

Alaska is one of the largest producers of oil in the United States, which is the largest producer of oil in the world, a position it’s held since 2018, yet we’re nowhere close to being alone in delivering oil to market. Worldwide private and publicly-owned entities conduct their own exploration and production activities, all of which feed into a vibrant global oil market that—as Alaskans well know—can be unpredictable and influenced by innumerable economic, political, and social factors.

etlin Lake in Alaska’s eastern interior is situated in the Tetlin Passage, a corridor through the upper Tanana River valley where the Alaska Range and Wrangell Mountains create a funnel for migratory birds. Tetlin Lake also feeds the Tetlin River, a short tributary of the Tanana. Both are named for the Athabascan village of Tetlin, located along the riverbank within hiking distance of both the Tanana and the lake.

The Upper Tanana Athabascan language gives the lake a different name: Manh Choh, which simply means “big lake.”

orth Slope Borough communities were supposed to be well into a six-year program of capital improvements by now. The COVID-19 pandemic interrupted the timeline, but the federal Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act is revving it back up.

In 2020, the North Slope Borough approved a capital plan through 2025 with a special focus on construction projects in eight Arctic communities.

“We prioritize our projects based on life, health, and safety issues—things that will make our residents’ lives better,” says Bernadette Adams, director of the borough’s Capital Improvement Program Management. “These include things like providing water and sewer to homes or creating eight- or ten-plexes to help ease the housing crisis. Our goal is to undertake projects that will have a good impact in these communities.”

he new refrigerator for employees at Alaska Premier Auctions and Appraisals has a video screen on the door. That’s not just because co-owners Dan Newman and Nick Cline like to pamper their staff; the fridge door becomes one more place to display security monitors watching the eclectic stock of merchandise.

Newman spent a decade in marketing and sales for KTUU Channel 2, and he says those skills transfer to auctions. He used to deal with mattress stores one day, then cars the next. Now he deals in taxidermy, liquor, firearms, furniture, paintings, knickknacks, and office surplus—none with set prices. A “salesman through and through,” Newman decided to monetize his motormouth by training at Missouri Auction School, specializing in charity benefits. He opened the auction house in 2018 and is its principal auctioneer.

Barge service to the North Slope Villages

Alaska Marine Lines is providing scheduled barge service to the North Slope Villages of Point Hope, Point Lay, Wainwright, Utqiagvik (Barrow), Prudhoe Bay and Kaktovik.

The stops are in addition to Alaska Marine Lines’ many other service locations including the major hubs of Naknek, Dillingham, Nome, Bethel and Kotzebue, and more than 65 villages along the coast of Western Alaska.