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Road to NPR-A State, North Slope Borough looking at building industrial road from Dalton to National Petroleum Reserve-Alaska; would cross Colville, tie into BIA-funded road to Nuiqsut By Patricia Jones PNA Contributing Writer
Future access to the National Petroleum Reserve-Alaska would likely be easier with a new industrial road that crosses the Colville River, part of an overall Northwest Alaska Transportation Plan that the state is developing.
Department of Transportation and Public Facilities planners are working with the North Slope Borough to develop one of two possible routes for an all-season gravel road running east to west, which would cross the Colville River and end in the village of Nuiqsut.
Year-round access across that wide span of water would help lower costs for fuel and other supplies needed by villagers, as well as create a new staging area for westward exploration work into NPR-A by Alaska’s oil industry.
“Ice road seasons are shrinking, yet the oil industry is trying to extend into NPR-A, and it’s a tough show for them,” said Mike McKinnon, senior planner at DOT&PG. “We’re wondering if this kind of road will both assist development and bring things on-line earlier.”
In addition, villagers living in Nuiqsut could benefit from truck freight deliveries, as opposed to having consumable goods flown in. Prices for fuel range up to $4 a gallon, and for milk, up to $8 a gallon, said Rex Okakok, director of planning and community services department in the North Slope Borough.
“Nuiqsut is just 20 some miles from the road, and it’s ridiculous that they do not have access to those existing roads to get cheaper food or gas or fuel,” he said. “Since the Dalton Highway was built, a lot of people benefit from it. They drive up and down, but we don’t benefit from it up here. It’s just useless to us.”
In a separate construction project, villagers from Nuiqsut could gain summer road access to the Colville River, under a Bureau of Indian Affairs road project. (See sidebar to this story.) Two routes being considered One route being considered would come off the existing oil field road network, probably around the Tarn development, McKinnon said. That road would extend west across the Colville. Total length would be 18 miles.
“One issue the oil industry has to look at is their high activity zones,” McKinnon said. “Can we do bypasses … build more of an arterial road that goes east to west, with less contact with oil field activities that you have to move through to get to NPR-A?”
The other proposed route, about 70 miles long, would be built independent of existing North Slope road infrastructure. “It follows decent (road building) terrain, somewhere from Nuiqsut east and south,” McKinnon said.
That route would intersect the Dalton Highway, roughly 40 miles south of Deadhorse. “We may come back and look at other types of connections that are further north,” McKinnon said.
Either route is still conceptional at this point. DOT&PF hopes to produce a draft plan for this road project proposal in March 2003 with a final plan out later that year. Should funds be secured for such a project, construction would be several years in the future, McKinnon said.
“A lot of other routes were considered, but this is probably the one that has the best chance of happening in the near future,” said John Aho, CH2M Hill’s project manager for the North Slope road study.
DOT&PF has hired that consulting firm to provide assistance and analysis for the North Slope access route.
Right now, neither of the proposed routes is final, both McKinnon and Aho said.
“All it is, is just a line on a map for discussion purposes,” Aho said. “We have a lot of work to do the next few months to see where that line really will finally be recommended to be.”
Project concept evolved from Northwest planning effort, industry and community needs McKinnon said the North Slope industrial road idea came about during talks with oil companies, Nuiqsut villagers and research in developing the Northwest Alaska Transportation Plan.
That planning document originally was designed to consider transportation infrastructure ideas that could open up vast mineral and coal deposits in the remote northwestern part of Alaska.
But preliminary analysis showed a stagnant, if not declining, worldwide market for minerals contained in underground deposits in northwest Alaska, McKinnon said.
“We saw that, while mining and coal is not going fast in any particular direction, oil and gas — especially NPR-A — has some potential,” McKinnon said. “Based on the revenue source we get out of oil as a state, that kind of investment might make sense.”
About at the same time — a little more than two years ago — McKinnon sat in on ice road discussions with the oil industry.
“The ice road season has shortened from 204 days down to 124 days, from (Department of Natural Resources) permits,” McKinnon said. “At the same time, they’re trying to further and further west, and they’re having some water shortage problems.”
DOT&PF has discussed the new road plan with oil industry representatives, particularly those from ConocoPhillips, which has significant exploration interests in NPR-A, and with partner Anadarko Petroleum, already announced discoveries from wells drilled in 2001.
Dawn Patience, spokeswoman for ConocoPhillips Alaska, said it was too early for the company to publicly comment on the DOT&PF road proposal.
“I think industry is interested. They’re smart enough to be concerned that it be the right thing at the right time,” McKinnon said. “We’ve got a ways to go, taking this idea and running it through industry and the borough … we’re pretty excited about the opportunity it presents, if it makes sense and we can get the kind of funding that will make it move.”
No cost estimates for either route, bridge biggest barrier No one involved with the plan provided any kind of cost estimate for the new road.
“It’s too early to do that. We have to understand the design standards for the road itself,” McKinnon said. “Another thing we have learned over time is that you make those first cut numbers when you have something to make them on.”
Other issues include caribou migration and river crossings. Besides the Colville, such an industrial road would have to cross three other rivers, McKinnon said.
“The biggest piece is the bridge crossing,” he said. “It’s a big river, it’s got complex soils and complex braiding. If it were easy, I’m sure the oil industry would have done it eons before.”
Currently, the group is considering Colville crossing sites upriver from Nuiqsut, where the river necks down and well-established banks are present.
Another consideration is locating sources of gravel for road construction.
“We’re in the first stages of really sinking our teeth into the idea — mapping it out, understanding the impacts,” McKinnon said. “The key to this is making sure the North Slope Borough and Nuiqsut are comfortable with the idea, while going through the process of determining what it is.
“We want to know if a project should be extracted from the plan and be made a design and construction project,” he added. “Take it from planning to a real project stage, and do it by July.”
He envisions multiple sources for funding, including Alaska Industrial Development & Export Authority, DOT&PF, North Slope Borough and some industry funding.
“It’s a decision that the North Slope Borough and industry will make with us — if this is a practical way to improve transportation into NPR-A,” McKinnon said. “I realized that we may fight about Arctic National Wildlife Refuge for years, but if we are going to develop NPR-A, we should look for ways to accelerate development of it.”
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