:quality(70)/arc-anglerfish-arc2-prod-adn.s3.amazonaws.com/public/23M2KZYZ6NAAVMERBZRPT6SIKI)
One suggestion for solving the looming energy shortage in Alaska's population centers is to go back in time to the 1960s and '70s, when coal was king in the United States.
The governor, lawmakers, city officials and business leaders fear the railbelt — the population corridor that stretches from Fairbanks south through the Matanuska Valley and Anchorage to the Kenai Peninsula — could run out of natural gas by the end of the decade. Are concerned.
For decades, the region has lived in underground warehouses near natural gas from the Kenai Peninsula and Cook Inlet. Energy is plentiful and generally affordable, but like all good things, oil and gas storage in particular is at the bottom of the barrel.
Railbelt leaders are scrambling for answers as they anticipate running out of gas for heat and power generation by the end of the century. They want to know what the state can do to help drillers find and produce more gas from the Cook Inlet region. But if that doesn't work, you'll need another solution.
That could mean increasing interest in burning coal.
Alaska has huge underground coal reserves, so supply is not an issue. The hurdles are high in terms of environment, cost, and feasibility. Everything is as absolute as the law of gravity, but that doesn't matter to promoters.
A few months ago, a dubious report produced under the auspices of an Alberta-based coal-fired power generation advocacy group, with the support of mining companies with claims in Alaska, revealed that coal would not be able to meet the railbelt's energy needs. suggested that it was the answer.
All someone has to do is develop a coal mine, build a power plant, build miles of power lines to feed the power into the grid, and send the carbon dioxide emitted by the power plant deep underground. All you have to do is lay miles of pipeline to fill it. That last part, sequestering CO2 underground, which negatively impacts global warming, is a big part of the business plan. The federal government pays billions of dollars in tax credits to developers who emit greenhouse gases in places where the sun doesn't shine.
But coal has its day, and it's not tomorrow.
More than 20 years ago, coal was the largest power generation fuel in two-thirds of states. Now it's down to about a dozen. The last large-scale coal-fired power plant in the United States was built more than a decade before him. The last operational coal-fired power plant of any size began operating in Fairbanks in 2020.
There's a second idea, if not coal, flowing through the Alaska Dream pipeline, and it also dates back to the 1970s. If North Slope gas could ignite the tips of burners, people could stay warm and appliances could run almost forever. That's because someone found a way to spend billions of dollars to build an 800-mile buried pipeline through the hills and valleys of Alaska, meaning tundra, permafrost, rivers, mountains, snow and ice, and seismic faults. It happens in an instant.
And then there's the financial question of how half a million people will pay the bills for a multimillion-dollar project.
Regardless, this is Alaska and nothing needs to come true if you hold on to your dreams.
The Alaska Gas Line Development Corporation, which has spent hundreds of millions of dollars over the past decade chasing the dream of building pipelines and selling North Slope gas to Asia, has thrown up its hands and now forget about Asia. , argued that we should just build $10 gas. 1 billion lines serving the Railbelt.
It's mostly a ploy to keep the agency open, since the state Senate has lost interest in the gas export delusion and recently voted to remove the agency from the state budget.
If people really want to give this agency jobs and at the same time want to go back to coal, they should change the name to Alaska Coal Development Corporation (ACDC). It would share a lot with rock bands that started out in the 1970s. Their latest album was “Power Up''.
Larry Persily is a longtime journalist in Alaska who has taken time off for federal, state, and local public policy work in Alaska and Washington, DC. She lives in Anchorage and is the publisher of the weekly Wrangell Sentinel.
The views expressed here are those of the author and are not necessarily endorsed by the Anchorage Daily News, which welcomes a wide range of viewpoints. To submit your work for consideration, please email comment(at)adn.com. Submissions of less than 200 words should be sent to letters@adn.com or click here to submit via your web browser. Read our full letter and comment guidelines here.
