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MINING NEWS: Railroads could unlock Alaska minerals Lack of infrastructure in Alaska makes it difficult to access remote areas; two proposed railroads could change the scenery Sarah Hurst For Mining News
Two Alaskans prominent in the mining industry have spent years nurturing dreams of railroads. Both presented their visions at the Arctic International Mining Symposium in Fairbanks the week of March 13. Professor Paul Metz, a geologist at the University of Alaska Fairbanks, wants to see a rail link from Alaska to Canada. Steve Borell, executive director of the Alaska Miners Association, hopes that one day a railroad from the Brooks Range to Norton Sound will be built, providing access to the vast reserves of coal on the North Slope.
The Alaska-Canada rail link proposal, which Metz has supported since writing a report about it for the Department of Transportation in 1996, is also a pet project of Alaska Gov. Frank Murkowski, who has been promoting it in conjunction with his efforts to build a natural gas pipeline. In 2000 Murkowski, then a U.S. senator, sponsored a bill that authorized $6 million for a 24-member bilateral commission with 12 members from the United States and 12 from Canada to study the benefits of a rail connection from Fairbanks to Canada. The commission never met, but in October 2001 Murkowski asked Metz and his colleagues to undertake an economic analysis ahead of seating the commission.
Metz and his team also received $15 million from the U.S. Army to research and produce an EIS for rail and other surface access from Fairbanks to nearby training grounds and to Delta Junction 80 miles away, where the missile defense installation is located at Fort Greely. That EIS is expected to be complete by the end of the year, and Metz’s report to Gov. Murkowski is due to be submitted in June. Several possible Canadian links There are several possible destinations for the proposed rail link to connect with the existing Canadian railroad. The closest points are in British Columbia, at Fort Nelson or to the small community of Chipmunk south of Dease Lake. “We’re in the process of generating a huge amount of data,” Metz said. “The most important aspect of this study is to define the right questions so that we can get the right answers when the project is completed.”
The issue isn’t about connecting Fairbanks to British Columbia, it’s about connecting Fairbanks to the whole of North America by surface transportation, Metz emphasized. The distance to Chicago, where many of Alaska’s manufactured goods come from, would be 2,700 miles by rail, which is 700 miles shorter than the current surface route to Seattle and on to Whittier or Seward by sea. Fort McMurray in Alberta, the hub for the Athabasca oil sands, is located at almost the center of the proposed rail link. “There’s more oil in the Athabasca tar sands than there is conventional, proven oil reserves in the rest of the world put together,” Metz said. “The entire economy of North America is going to be affected by the utilization of that resource over the next 100 years.” Skagway would be safe from quakes Enhancing the trade relationships between the United States and Canada would be worth the estimated $7 billion cost of the railroad, Metz believes. “In the not-too-distant future the port of Seattle is going to reach its capacity,” he said. The rail link would connect the White Pass railroad, which runs from Yukon to the Alaska port of Skagway, with the rest of the Alaska and Canadian railroad systems. “It would provide us with another port of access in the Gulf of Alaska,” Metz said. Unlike ports in Southcentral Alaska, Skagway is far enough away from seismic hazards to avoid significant damage from an earthquake like the one that devastated Anchorage in 1964, he added.
It takes about one-third as much energy to transport goods by rail as it does to haul them by truck, according to Metz, and this will be a crucial factor in the future as the price of fuel continues to rise. We should look at the long-term picture and not the immediate rate of return for a railroad, Metz urged. When the railroad was built at Fort McMurray in 1921 the community only had a handful of residents, he pointed out. “If we’re going to predicate or constrain this investment in a rail connection to the rest of North America on proven mineral reserves, we probably will never build a railroad,” Metz said. If 10 million tons of freight on the railroad could be guaranteed, it would be economic today, he added. Borell looking at route from Nome By contrast with Metz, Steve Borell has conducted his study of a possible 400-mile railroad from the Brooks Range to Norton Sound at Nome by himself, without the benefit of millions of dollars in funding. A mining engineer, Borell began the research when he was taking a class in project management at the University of Alaska Anchorage. Northwestern Alaska is home to Red Dog — the world’s largest zinc mine — as well as the Ambler district, where copper could potentially be mined. But the key to the rail project is the Arctic coal, which is estimated to be one-quarter of the entire coal reserves of the United States. It has never been mined because as yet it is uneconomical.
A vital factor in planning the railroad would be obtaining acceptance of the idea by the Native residents of the area, according to Borell. “One of the major fears of a lot of the Native population in far western Alaska, in the northwest in particular, is that they’re going to see Winnebagoes come driving down the highway, gravel road be it, and shooting their caribou and moose,” Borell said. “I think over time they’re going to realize that a railroad doesn’t provide that kind of hazard to their way of life.” Coal mines would be needed The railroad would require numerous other infrastructure components, including one to five large coal mines, a mine-mouth coal-fired power plant, a storage area at Nome and a conveyor and trestle from the storage area to a deepwater port. Additional rail spurs could be built to Red Dog and to the Ambler district.
Rock and gravel quarries on village and regional Native corporation lands could also be developed in the area, Borell said. However, the Jones Act requires that any product moving from a U.S. port to a U.S. port must be transported on a U.S. vessel, which could potentially rule out the possibility of exporting gravel from Nome to San Francisco because there are no U.S. vessels in existence that are capable of making that haul.
Building the railroad without crossing any of the national parks and other conservation units in the region would be another serious challenge, but it can be done, Borell believes. Arctic Slope Regional Corp., which owns the land where the coal is located, would also have to be persuaded that several coal mines are preferable.
“The folks from Arctic Slope Regional Corporation, what they want is one mine with about three to four hundred employees, that’s what they want, they don’t want five mines with four hundred each,” Borell said. “But one mine a railroad won’t make, I don’t believe it, and I don’t know if five mines will do it, but it gives you a chance.”
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