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Corps favors Nome for deep-draft port Proposes dredging to 28-foot depth, expanding causeway and installing new dock in western Alaska harbor; could take supply vessels Alan Bailey Petroleum News
The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers is in the process of completing a report recommending an expansion to the harbor at Nome as a preferred option for a deep-draft port in Arctic Alaska, Lorraine Cordova, economic section chief in the Corps’ Alaska District, told a meeting of the Alaska Association of Environmental Professionals on Jan. 20. Cordova said the Corps has developed what it calls a “tentatively selected plan” for the Nome harbor expansion - the process for selecting a port site remains far from complete, with several reviews of the proposal still to be conducted.
Harbor expansion The plan, as currently envisaged, would entail adding a 450-foot caisson dock to the existing Nome harbor, demolishing an existing spur breakwater, expanding the harbor’s causeway and dredging the floor of the harbor to achieve a water depth of 28 feet, Cordova explained. The modified harbor could accommodate offshore oil industry supply vessels, for example, but would not be deep enough to take an icebreaker. The total cost of the development would be some $207 million.
The Corps has been conducting a joint study with the Alaska Department of Transportation and Public Facilities into the Arctic deep-draft port concept.
Cordova said that the Corps is currently evaluating options for optimizing the harbor depth at Nome. But, although it may be possible to deepen the harbor for icebreakers, the additional cost of doing this would probably turn out to be greater than the benefit gained, she said.
Public comment period The study report, which should be published soon, will undergo a public comment period. The study team will then review the comments it receives, looking for “show stoppers” and making modifications as necessary. The report must then go through several other reviews, including a Civil Works Review Board review, a state agency review and external peer review, before being signed off by the Corps chief of engineers. The U.S. Congress would then have to authorize the project and appropriate the necessary federal funding before the port expansion could proceed, Cordova said.
Assuming that the water depth in the harbor would end up being more than 20 feet, the federal government would pay 75 percent of the cost of modifying the harbor, with non-federal sponsors picking up the remainder of the cost and the cost of any new local service facilities associated with the port, Cordova said.
Minimal environmental impact Michael Noah, environmental resources section chief in the Corps’ Alaska District said that the relatively modest amount of dredge material that would need to be removed from the harbor could be discharged onto a local beach with minimal environmental impact. Existing environmental assessments for the placement of maintenance dredging material onto that beach and for major modifications made to the Nome harbor a few years ago would meet the needs of the National Environmental Policy Act assessment for the project - no environmental impact statement would be required, Noah said. However, deepening the harbor further, to say 35 feet, would involve the handling of a huge volume of dredge material, he said.
A long debate The question of whether and how to establish a deep-draft port in Arctic Alaska has been a subject of debate for several years, especially as the volume of Arctic shipping builds up and interest in Arctic offshore oil exploration increases, in response to the multi-year shrinkage of the summer Arctic sea ice extent. When Shell conducted exploratory drilling in the Chukchi and Beaufort seas in 2012, the company had to use Dutch Harbor in the Aleutian Islands, hundreds of miles to the south, as its main logistics base.
The deep-draft port study that the Corps and the state of Alaska are conducting resulted from conferences held in 2008 and 2010, and a subsequent planning meeting, in which Arctic stakeholders brainstormed Arctic infrastructure needs, identifying deep-draft vessel support as a top priority, Cordova said.
In 2012 the Alaska Northern Waters Task Force, established by the Alaska Legislature, identified a number of potential deep-draft port sites.
And a subsequent meeting in April 2013, involving, among others, people from Arctic communities, the U.S. Coast Guard, the U.S. Navy, and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, came up with a long list of infrastructure needs, Cordova said.
14 possible sites As a starting point for the joint study between the Corps and the state, there appeared to be 14 possible sites for a deep-draft port, Cordova said. To narrow down the choices, the study team applied five selection criteria: proximity to operations such as shipping and mining that might use the port; connections to other modes of transportation; size of the local population that might support development on the land adjacent the port; natural depth of the water at the site; and navigation accessibility, bearing in mind wind, wave and ice conditions.
This line of analysis led to just three possibilities: Nome, Point Spencer and Cape Riley. Of these choices, only Nome has an existing man-made harbor. Point Spencer and Cape Riley are locations with relatively deep water in Port Clarence, a natural harbor to the northwest of Nome, Cordova said.
However, neither of the two Port Clarence sites showed a positive benefit to cost ratio for port development. The team quickly dropped Cape Riley as an option - a mine that has not yet started up would have been the only operation to be supported by a port at that location, Cordova explained. And, although Point Spencer has an existing navigation station and airport, there was a lack of supporting data and official support that might have justified this choice. That left Nome, the location that has now become the focus of the study team’s attention.
Three scenarios Looking at the economic justification for an expansion of the Nome harbor, the team considered three scenarios: a no-growth case; a base case assuming the continuation of past growth rates for the port; and a high scenario involving use of the port for support vessels from three offshore oil projects. And, while the cost of the low case significantly exceeded the potential benefits, the high scenario showed a modest margin of benefits over costs. On the other hand, there are many unknowns and much uncertainty in the potential future use of the port, Cordova commented.
On Dec. 16 the Corps headquarters accepted the Nome project as a tentatively selected plan, thus setting the stage for the draft study report that the study team is about to publish, she said.
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