Author: alaskaadmin

The war in Iran is risking what could be a catastrophic spike in the price of fuel in the rural villages and hub communities across Alaska’s coast — and distributors are also warning of possible supply shortages.

Even before the war, fuel prices in the state’s off-road system communities were eye-wateringly high: Unleaded gas was $6.72 a gallon this winter in the Western Alaska hub town of Bethel, while in the Northwest Alaska village of Ambler, the price of gas and heating fuel has been $17.50 a gallon for the past year, according to local officials.

Vendors that sell bulk fuel to those regions are now warning that prices could rise 50% due to the war-driven supply crunch, according to Ingemar Mathiasson, energy manager for the Northwest Arctic Borough, which held a meeting attended by fuel company representatives last week in the regional hub town of Kotzebue.

Rural communities can receive as little as a single bulk fuel delivery during a shipping season that runs only through the summer — meaning that rates can be locked in at that price for the whole next year, even if global commodity prices fall. Government and Native corporation subsidies can help offset costs, but prices are still high and about to get higher.

“We’re looking at, maybe, a survival scenario for rural Alaska,” Mathiasson said in a phone interview Monday. “At those prices, I would imagine that people are going to try to move into Anchorage. I don’t know if you can heat your house at over $20 a gallon.”

Policymakers say they’re tracking the problem but haven’t announced concrete steps to protect consumers.

“This is one of the things that is top of my list right now, this week, here in Washington — to raise this within the administration to try to get in front of it,” said U.S. Sen. Lisa Murkowski. “It has to be a full-on effort to make sure that these communities are not left high and dry.”

The energy shock from the Iran war is landing worldwide, as Iran’s effective shutdown of the Strait of Hormuz keeps some 20% of global oil production out of the markets.

The effects have landed particularly hard in Asia, the destination of 80% of the oil that typically transits the Strait. And Asian refineries produce much of the supply for the more than 160 Western Alaska communities that receive maritime fuel deliveries during the May through October season, according to the Alaska Chadux̂ Network, a tanker and fuel distribution industry trade group.

Buying fuel from other sources “may be possible,” but likely at “significantly elevated prices,” the network’s chief executive, Buddy Custard, wrote in a recent letter received by Alaska policymakers.

“Despite best efforts, a supply gap remains a credible risk,” Custard wrote in his letter, dated March 31. “An undefined portion of the estimated 140 million gallons of fuel may be at risk of non-delivery, affecting dozens of communities, regional hubs, and critical infrastructure that serve as lifelines for surrounding villages.”

Custard said he was unavailable for an interview, but he shared additional correspondence with a state House member’s office from last week in which he said it’s difficult to “confirm specific outcomes or timelines” given the “highly dynamic and unpredictable” situation in the Middle East.

“It is not that alternative sources are entirely unavailable, but rather that they are constrained by a combination of limited refining capacity for the required fuel types, existing contractual commitments, and significantly higher costs,” Custard wrote. “In short, limited supply may be available, but not necessarily in the volumes, timeframe, or at the price points required to support Western Alaska communities.”

The uncertain outlook poses a dilemma for leaders at rural institutions that purchase fuel, including village governments and utilities, who are questioning whether to commit to fuel purchases now, later, in full, or in multiple orders to spread out the cost.

“I don’t know what to tell members who say, ‘Should I wait?’ I don’t know what to tell members who say, ‘I can do this much now, this much later,’” said Nils Andreassen, executive director of the nonprofit Alaska Municipal League, which supports local governments. “I don’t know how to keep ahead of it. And the current global uncertainty is not giving me a lot of confidence.”

Fuel vendors — which for Western Alaska include Vitus, Crowley and Delta Western — are urging customers to not delay placing their orders in hopes that prices will improve, according to a written summary of their comments from last week’s meeting in Kotzebue.

“We’re really getting squeezed on all this,” Tom Atkinson, the general manager of Kotzebue’s electric utility, said in a phone interview. “Nobody wants to lock in at this high price.”

Atkinson said that his utility’s diesel fuel supply for the past year cost $3.10 a gallon. This year’s delivery of a million gallons, he said, could come in at more than $6 a gallon.

In prior years, fuel companies have sometimes loaded their tankers with more supply than communities have ordered, expecting to sell the excess once the cargo arrives in Alaska. But this year, vendors say the price is too high for them to buy and transport fuel that risks going unsold.

A cold winter has also produced more sea ice than usual, which could shorten the delivery season. If communities miss the tanker delivery window, those that end up with shortages may have to turn to deliveries by plane, at even higher prices.

“We end up with situations where if the communities don’t fill their tanks, we don’t have enough airplanes in Alaska to help,” said Mathiasson, the Northwest Arctic Borough energy manager. “You just can’t wait until the last minute.”

Energy shocks have hit Alaska before, notably in a major price spike in 2008. That year, lawmakers used a huge windfall in taxes paid by Alaska’s oil-producing companies to help fund a “resource rebate” added to the annual checks written by state government to residents. The total paid to each recipient that year was $3,269, double the amount of the previous year.

This year, given the state’s tighter budget, advocates are pushing for measures that more narrowly target the communities in need. One concept supported by the municipal league is boosting the $750,000 cap on a state program that offers loans to local governments and utilities when they make their bulk fuel purchases.

“I’m not done turning over every stone and seeing what we can do,” House Speaker Bryce Edgmon, who represents a rural legislative district centered in the Bristol Bay region, said in a phone interview from Juneau. “If this war continues, there’s no question it’s going to be catastrophic.”

Edgmon noted that rural Alaska communities already were seeing higher costs for groceries and goods delivered through a federal program called bypass mail, which had a 9% rate increase last year.

A spokesperson for Gov. Mike Dunleavy declined to comment on the outlook for rural Alaska fuel prices and policies under consideration to address them.

In a worst-case scenario of a $5-a-gallon increase, the overall hit to rural Alaska from the war-driven fuel price spike could reach hundreds of millions of dollars, according to one economist’s estimate.

Each rural Alaskan, on average, requires some 1,200 gallons of fuel a year to meet their demand for heat, transportation and electricity, according to economist Steve Colt, who works with the Alaska Center for Energy and Power. By Colt’s calculation, the added expense could reach $6,000 per person and $450 million across the state’s rural communities.

Even before the spike, electricity and heating fuel can cost households in one region of Western Alaska, the Kusilvak Census Area, some 45% of their income, according to data collected by the energy center’s founding director, Gwen Holdmann. That area already faces a poverty rate of more than 30%, triple the statewide level.

“It’s definitely a serious issue that we’re raising up to the highest level,” Mathiasson said.

Nathaniel Herz welcomes tips at natherz@gmail.com or (907) 793-0312. This article was originally published in Northern Journal, a newsletter from Herz. Subscribe at this link.

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Alaska Gov. Mike Dunleavy has been appointed to the U.S. Arctic Research Commission at a time when the federal agency is pivoting from its longtime focus on environmental science to more emphasis on military defense and economic development.

Dunleavy is an ally of President Donald Trump. Dunleavy’s presidential appointment, announced by the commission this week, comes five months after Liz Qaulluq Cravalho’s position on the commission was terminated. Cravalho is vice president of lands at NANA Regional Corporation, the Alaska Native corporation for the state’s northwest region. She was initially appointed by then-President Joe Biden in 2021 and reappointed in 2024.

The commission, created in 1984, advises the president and Congress on research policy. Its seven commissioners are appointed by the president.

Dunleavy is the first sitting governor to be appointed to the commission, which advises the president and Congress on Arctic research. Past Alaska lieutenant governors have served on the commission, but not during their time in state office. Mead Treadwell chaired the commission prior to being elected in 2010 as lieutenant governor in the Parnell administration, and Fran Ulmer chaired it after serving as lieutenant governor in the Knowles administration and after serving as chancellor of the University of Alaska Anchorage.

In 2019, his first year in office, Dunleavy used his veto powers to cut state funding of the University of Alaska system by 41%, an action that at the time was characterized as devastating to the university’s Arctic research, among other activities. Much of the funding was later restored through a compromise Dunleavy made with the university.

In a statement released by the commission, Dunleavy praised the role of Arctic research, saying it helps Alaskans.

“Alaska sits at the forefront of the Arctic, and our communities, resources, and strategic position make us essential to advancing responsible research, economic development, and national security in the region,” he said in a statement released by the commission. “I look forward to working with fellow commissioners to ensure that Arctic research reflects the needs of Alaskans while strengthening America’s leadership in the Arctic.”

The Trump-appointed chair of the commission, speaking Wednesday at the Arctic Encounter Summit in Anchorage, said the organization is “tremendously thrilled” to have Dunleavy as a member.

“We’re super excited about that,” said Thomas Emanuel Dans, appointed in December. “We’ve got the very experienced hand and voice at our commission, and we’re looking to do big things here.”

A pivot to security needs

Dans, who also served on the commission during the first Trump administration, expressed an expansive view of the Arctic that he likened to that of 19th century explorers.

“We want to create the conditions that really unleash human flourishing. We want more. We want human life. We want people to have big dreams,” he said.

Rather than focusing on pure science, the commission is focused on security, as Dans described it.

“Security is probably the overriding, overarching theme of things,” he said.

But security has several facets, he said. It includes military security, international security, energy security and community security, “which can be interpreted broadly in terms of health and well-being” for Arctic residents and others in the nation and the world, he said.

Dans, who lives in Texas and spent most of his career in finance, served on the U.S. Arctic Research Commission during the first Trump administration. But his comments on Wednesday indicated some gaps in his Arctic and Alaska knowledge.

He mentioned Russia’s Wrangel Island, off the northern coast of Siberia, as a security threat. Wrangel island “is close to Alaska here,” he said in his speech. “And for a long time it was incorporated as part of the United States. Today we face missiles pointing at us from Wrangel Island.”

Wrangel Island was never part of the United States. There is a place with a similar name – Wrangell Island – that is located in Southeast Alaska. Since 2004, Russia’s Wrangel Island, located 300 miles from the nearest point in Alaska, has been designated as a UNESCO World Heritage Site. It is famous for its Arctic biodiversity, including the world’s largest concentration of Pacific walruses.

A decade ago, Russia built a military base on the island with a focus on radar systems to monitor airspace. The military use of the island is part of Russia’s military buildup in the Arctic, which has worried U.S. officials, and it is also considered to pose a potential threat to the natural resources there.

In his Arctic Encounter Summit comments, Dans hailed the planned expansion of the U.S. Coast Guard’s icebreaker fleet, saying the fleet has “gone from zero to maybe 14.” However, the Coast Guard for decades has operated two polar-class icebreakers: the Healy, which performs annual missions in Alaska and the wider Arctic, and the Polar Star, which usually sails in the Antarctic. The Coast Guard recently acquired another icebreaker for Arctic operations. Originally an oil industrial vessel called the Aiviq, the ship was renamed Storis and commissioned in a Juneau ceremony in August. The fleet is poised to expand: there was funding for more than a dozen new icebreakers in the Trump administration spending bill known as the One Big Beautiful Bill Act.

Concerning Russia, which holds more Arctic coastline and land than any other nation, Dans urged more cooperation and communication. “I’d love to have the younger generation in Alaska learn Russian,” he said.

Within a few miles from the Dena’ina Civic and Convention Center, where Dans spoke at the Arctic Encounter Summit, classes were being conducted in Russian language at elementary, middle and high schools through the Anchorage School District’s Russian immersion program. It was launched as a full-time program in 2024, according to the school district.

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On March 31, President Trump issued a new executive order on citizenship records and mail‑in ballots entitled “Ensuring Citizenship Verification and Integrity in Federal Elections.” The order has nothing to do with election integrity — the name is like “Newspeak,” Orwell’s fictional language for a totalitarian state. It is an unlawful attempt to seize control of how Alaskans vote and to make an error‑ridden federal database the gatekeeper of our ballots.

Ever since statehood Alaska has built an election system that reflects our geography and our values. By‑mail and absentee voting are not mere conveniences here; they are how thousands of our neighbors who live in remote areas accessible only by air or sea participate in democracy at all. Yet the president now proposes to tell Alaska when and to whom we may send ballots by mail, based not on Alaska law, but on whether a voter’s name appears on a new federal “citizenship list.”

The order directs the Department of Homeland Security to compile state‑by‑state rosters of presumed U.S. citizens eligible to vote in federal elections and then directs the Postal Service to withhold mail ballots from anyone not on those lists. In one stroke, the president purports to rewrite who may receive a ballot by mail, how ballots travel through the postal system and which government gets the last word on whether an Alaskan can vote. That authority does not belong to him.

The U.S. Constitution is explicit in this matter. It reads in pertinent part: “The Times, Places and Manner of holding Elections . . .shall be prescribed in each State by the Legislature thereof; but the Congress may at any time by Law make or alter such Regulations . . .”   Alaska’s Legislature has determined who may vote absentee, how those ballots are requested and mailed, and how they are counted. An executive order that conditions ballot delivery on a federally controlled citizenship list displaces those laws with presidential preference. That is not faithful execution of the law; it is legislation by directive. And it is patently unconstitutional.

The order also collides with bedrock principles of federalism. The federal government may not simply commandeer state election officials or local postmasters to administer a new federal scheme that overrides state choices about mail voting. By insisting that Alaska adapt its procedures to match a federal citizenship database that we did not design, do not control and cannot effectively challenge, the administration seeks to turn state election workers into unwilling agents of a national policy they never adopted.

Even if the president had such power—which he does not—the policy itself is dangerously unsound. The citizenship records he proposes to rely on are notoriously unreliable. Federal and state databases routinely misclassify naturalized citizens as non‑citizens, lag months or years behind status changes, and contain basic errors in names, dates of birth and addresses. Tying ballot delivery to a single “State Citizenship List” assembled from these imperfect sources is a recipe for widespread disenfranchisement.

Those errors will not fall evenly. Naturalized citizens, Alaska Natives whose names and records do not conform to federal bureaucratic expectations and rural voters with inconsistent or non‑standard addresses are all especially vulnerable to being left off or misflagged in a national database. If the Postal Service is instructed not to send a ballot unless it can confirm a match on that list, many eligible Alaskans will simply never receive a ballot at all.

In urban areas, some voters might fall back on in‑person early voting or Election Day polling places. In much of Alaska, that is unrealistic. An elder in a village accessible only by plane or boat, a deployed service member relying on an overseas ballot or a college student temporarily out of state cannot easily “work around” a missing ballot. For them, the executive order does not mean extra paperwork. It means no vote.

The order also offers no meaningful, timely remedy for those wrongly excluded. By the time a voter discovers that no ballot has arrived and tries to untangle why their name is missing from a federal citizenship list, the election may be over. We will never know how many voices were silenced by database error rather than voter choice.

Alaska has used absentee and by‑mail voting for years without any evidence of widespread non‑citizen voting or ballot fraud. Our challenges are logistical, not criminal: weather, distance and infrastructure, not hordes of ineligible voters swamping the polls. Imposing a rigid, centralized federal screen on top of that system does nothing to address real problems, and threatens to create a new one that is far worse: a loss of confidence that ballots will arrive at all.

Let’s not attempt to dress this order up as a mere “data‑sharing” exercise rather than the federal takeover it truly is.

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