Day: April 23, 2026

No mining proposal in recent Alaska history has generated more concern for the state’s salmon runs than the Pebble project.

The huge copper and gold deposit extends into multiple salmon-bearing watersheds, and sits upstream from Alaska’s most lucrative salmon fishery.

But now, in a new court filing, Pebble’s developer says just a tiny number of salmon are blocking the mine’s construction — 27 fish, to be exact, and all one species.

Federal regulators, who halted the project in 2023, are “preserving” 27 coho salmon “at the cost of $800 billion” in minerals, lawyers for Pebble Limited Partnership wrote in a recent brief filed in Alaska’s federal district court.

The remarkably specific fish figure aligns with the number of spawning salmon counted years ago in a stream directly within the proposed mine site.

But Pebble’s opponents say it’s a gross mischaracterization: They’ve long worried that mining could harm the prolific Bristol Bay salmon runs downstream.

“I don’t think it’s a valid number,” said Daniel Cheyette, an executive at Bristol Bay’s Indigenous-owned regional corporation, which is opposed to the mine.

“It’s well documented in the administrative record that the mine is going to have very specific impacts to the mine site itself — and lots of impacts to the habitat below the mine site,” Cheyette added.

Pebble’s lawyers acknowledge that salmon at various life stages have been observed in streams near the mineral deposit. But they cite the specific number of spawning coho eight times across the 66 pages of their recent legal brief.

The figure has taken on a life of its own online, where it sparked outrage among Pebble advocates and stockholders who see those fish as an obstacle to huge profits.

“27 SALMON DUDE WTFFFFFFF,” one mine booster recently posted on X. She added, in a YouTube video: “Tell me where they are. I’ll kill them all right now, with my bare hands.”

The 27-fish-versus-800-billion-dollars narrative comes as part of the latest attempt by Pebble’s owner, Vancouver-based Northern Dynasty Minerals, to overturn a 2023 decision by the federal government that effectively quashed the development.

And it’s further evidence that Pebble is committed to a long-term effort to save the embattled project, which would tap into one of the world’s largest copper, gold and molybdenum deposits.

Pebble lacks key approvals, and its efforts to obtain them have been tied up in litigation and bureaucratic processes for years. But its owners continue to spend millions of dollars each year on legal fees and administrative expenses.

The project is still attracting investment because of its enormous size — and because global demand for copper is rising, according to David Hammond, a Colorado-based mineral economist with decades of industry experience.

“These investors, the ones that really provide the money, have to have a very long-term horizon on their investment strategy. And by long term, I don’t mean five years, I mean two decades,” Hammond said.

“Their feeling is, this is going to eventually go into production,” he added.

Pebble expects to spend some $14 million this fiscal year, primarily on litigation, according to a recent corporate disclosure with Canadian securities regulators.

Pebble has fueled debate across the Bristol Bay region and the state for years.

Supporters, including the Dunleavy administration and two local Indigenous-owned corporations, say building the mine would boost the rural region’s economy and create much-needed jobs.

But opponents, including a broad coalition of commercial fishermen, conservation groups and Alaska Native organizations, say the mine’s benefits are not worth the risk it poses to Bristol Bay’s salmon runs.

Pebble’s recent legal brief was filed by a Colorado-based lawyer at a high-powered international firm. It responds to a move by the Trump administration earlier this year to defend the Biden-era project veto.

In a statement shared with Northern Journal, Pebble’s chief executive, John Shively, said the company reiterates its view that the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s actions against the project contradicted an earlier federal environmental review, “which clearly states that the project can be done without harm to the salmon fishery in Bristol Bay.”

Pebble’s boosters have long argued that the mine’s impacts would be minimal and that it could coexist with a fishery that generates hundreds of millions of dollars a year. They note that many Bristol Bay salmon spawn in watersheds other than those where the mine is located.

But mine skeptics note that the project is expected to result in the loss of more than eight miles of anadromous fish streams and 91 miles of streams that support anadromous fish habitat. Federal regulators also say mining could affect downstream ecosystems through changes in flow — and opponents fear a failure at Pebble’s proposed waste disposal site could cause an environmental disaster.

Pebble’s lawyers, in their recent filing, point to a federal finding six years ago that the mine likely would not have a measurable impact on the Bristol Bay fishery, and they say the streams at the mine site “are especially low in salmon.”

“Only 27 have been observed spawning, in only one reach, and from only one species,” the lawyers wrote. Those fish “naturally might disappear in any given year anyway,” the brief said.

A Pebble spokesperson could not immediately confirm the source of the 27-salmon figure, though it corresponds with data from Pebble’s fish counts conducted nearly two decades ago.

Those data were published in a 2020 federal environmental review of the proposed mine. The document also says that surveys found juvenile salmon in streams within the mine’s proposed footprint, and that those streams support rearing habitat not just for coho but also king salmon.

The Trump administration’s lawyers, in their court brief earlier this spring, said that Pebble’s fish surveys were limited, and likely undercounts.

Northern Journal contributor Max Graham can be reached at max@northernjournal.com. He’s interested in any and all mining related stories, as well as introductory meetings with people in and around the industry.

This article was originally published in Northern Journal, a newsletter from Nathaniel Herz. Subscribe at this link.

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All over the world, nations are grappling with the ripple effects of the war in Iran and the blockade of the Strait of Hormuz, a critical artery for the global oil market. In the United States, however, President Donald Trump has emphasized that the country imports little oil through the strait, arguing that it “doesn’t need it.”

At a national level, that’s largely true. The United States consumes roughly 20 million barrels of oil per day and imports only a small fraction through that chokepoint. But for diesel-reliant communities in Western Alaska, the story looks very different. The supply chains that vendors rely on are often tied to refineries in Asia, and those routes are deeply exposed to disruptions in and around the Strait of Hormuz.

It may come as a surprise that much of the fuel consumed in rural Alaska is not from Alaska. This reflects both the state’s limited refining capacity and the constraints of global shipping routes and tanker availability. There are some exceptions. Yukon River communities, for example, receive fuel sourced from the Petro Star refinery and delivered by companies like Ruby Marine, providing a more stable and predictable supply. Much of Southeast Alaska, meanwhile, is supplied from refineries in Canada.

But in much of Western Alaska — including the Aleutians, Alaska Peninsula, and Bering Sea coast — nearly all fuel has, at least in the recent past, been refined in Asia and shipped thousands of miles to reach its final destination, often on voyages that can take more than 40 days. These deliveries must occur within a narrow summer window, when sea ice retreats just long enough to allow access.

And planning for those shipments is happening now.

At a recent community meeting in Kotzebue, fuel suppliers laid out a sobering reality due to the recent market turmoil. Voluntary export controls in Japan and South Korea have introduced significant uncertainty into the availability of fuel for Western Alaska — regardless of price. 

Vendors like Crowley are now pivoting to Canadian suppliers, but those markets are under strain as well. Tom Atkinson, the chief executive of Kotzebue Electric Association, said that fuel quotes for the cooperative are roughly double what they were last year. Fuel is by far the largest cost driver in rural electric systems, and when it rises, everything else follows.

Even so, Mr. Atkinson expects he will be able to secure supply for the cooperative. Prices will be high, but the fuel should arrive. He is far more concerned about smaller, upriver communities with fewer resources and even less flexibility. Their costs will almost certainly be much higher.

State programs like the Bulk Fuel Revolving Loan Fund can help communities finance fuel purchases, but they do little to shield them from the underlying volatility of global markets.

Even more concerning is the cost of heating oil. In Kotzebue, Atkinson said residents are already paying around $8 a gallon — a price that is quickly becoming untenable for many households.

In more remote areas, such as the Kusilvak Census Area further south along the coast, households spent on average about 16 percent of their income on electricity alone even before this impending crisis. When heating oil is included — essential in a region with few trees or other options for heating — that share can rise to as much as 45 percent. That is among the highest energy burdens anywhere in the United States. And that was last year.

At the same time that residents are bracing for a sharp increase in costs, the Trump administration has proposed, in its latest budget plan, eliminating funding for the federal Low Income Home Energy Assistance Program, or LIHEAP, which helps offset heating costs for low-income households. For many communities in Western Alaska, that support is not supplemental — it is essential. 

But the more troubling possibility is not just higher prices or the loss of assistance — it is supply itself. If deliveries are delayed or fall short, some communities could face shortages in the depths of winter, when a fuel shortage would become a true emergency. 

This is not the first time rural Alaska has been disproportionately exposed to global events.

Consider the war in Ukraine. For years, fuel deliveries to Western Alaska quietly depended on a surprising player: Russia.

Shipping routes serving Western Alaska often fall under the International Maritime Organization’s Polar Code, which establishes safety and environmental requirements for vessels operating in Arctic waters. Depending on the route and conditions, this can include ice-class design, specialized equipment and additional crew training. These requirements add cost to already expensive supply chains, particularly in remote regions with limited shipping options. Compounding the challenge, ice-strengthened tankers are relatively scarce worldwide, with Russia maintaining one of the largest fleets.

As a result, fuel bound for Western or northern Alaska communities was often carried on Russian-built or Russian-operated vessels, sometimes under foreign flags, traveling from Asian refineries to the Alaskan coast. The system was largely invisible, but it worked. In 2012, for example, the Russian ice-capable tanker Renda, escorted by the U.S. Coast Guard cutter Healy, delivered an emergency winter fuel shipment to Nome after early sea ice and fall storms cut off the community — an event that made the national news.

That system began to unravel after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Sanctions sharply curtailed access to Russian-linked vessels, and almost overnight, the availability of Polar Code-compliant tankers tightened. Shipping costs rose dramatically. And that additional cost is not limited to transporting fuel to Western Alaska. These vessels are often stationed offshore for extended periods, effectively serving as floating tank farms while smaller barges shuttle fuel to individual communities along the coast and river systems. The expense is therefore not just delivery, but time — standby charges of many thousands of dollars a day that accumulate quickly and are ultimately passed on to customers. Those costs rose several-fold after the invasion and they have not come back down.

This is what energy insecurity looks like in America.

If there is a lesson here, it is not simply that global events matter. It is that Alaska is not insulated from them — especially in the places that can least afford it.

We have built an energy system in rural Alaska that depends on long, fragile supply chains stretching across oceans and geopolitical fault lines. For decades, this system has held together. But it is becoming more expensive, more uncertain and more exposed with each passing year.

This reality should shape how we think about energy policy in this state. Reducing fuel use, diversifying local energy systems and maintaining the programs that help households afford basic energy services are not abstract goals — they are essential to keeping communities viable in the long run.

In the short term, there are also practical steps the state can take: increasing the loan cap in the Bulk Fuel Revolving Loan Fund, ensuring adequate support for the Alaska Heating Assistance Program and preparing for potential shortfalls in the Power Cost Equalization program. 

These steps are not precautionary — they are necessary. When global systems falter, it is not the Lower 48 — or even more urban places in Alaska — that feels it first or most acutely. It is communities like Kotzebue, Emmonak, and Hooper Bay. 

The lesson is not simply that global events matter. It is that our energy system is far more interconnected — and far more unequal in how it distributes risk and cost — than we tend to acknowledge. 

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