The mining newspaper for Alaska and Canada's North
The mining newspaper for Alaska and Canada's North
Board approves study of complete trans-Alaska road-rail-port corridor for transporting Ambler District ore concentrates North of 60 Mining News – April 22, 2022
The 411-mile Dalton Highway is a mostly dirt road that extends to Deadhorse on Alaska's oil-rich North Slope. This photo is from mile 210, which is near where the proposed Ambler Access Project will connect with this major north-south road.
Located across Cook Inlet, west of Anchorage, Port Mackenzie is being developed to export Alaska's natural resources. Once completed, a railroad extension to the deep-draft port will provide the shortest rail route from Fairbanks to tidewater.
At a time when the state is looking at being infused with billions of federal dollars to invest in upgrading roads, bridges, rails, ports and other infrastructure, the Alaska Industrial Development and Export Authority board has authorized an independent study of the 800-mile trans-Alaska transportation corridor that extends from the Ambler Mining District to ports in and around Anchorage.
Sitting roughly 200 miles west of Alaska's limited highway network, the Ambler District hosts rich domestic supplies of copper, zinc, cobalt, silver, and other minerals critical to renewable energy, electric vehicles, and other sectors of the economy. High-tech metals such as gallium, germanium, arsenic, palladium, and platinum have also been found in this mineral-rich but infrastructure-poor area of the state.
AIDEA says the development of the abundant resources in the Ambler Mining District aligns with the Biden administration's policies to reduce America's reliance on imports for its critical mineral needs and encourage responsible domestic new sources of the materials needed for EVs, lithium-ion batteries, wind turbines, and an array of other industrial and national security purposes.
"The known resources of the mining district include abundant deposits of copper and critical minerals essential to growing our nation's tech-focused economy and military preparedness," said AIDEA Executive Director Alan Weitzner.
While the high-grade deposits in the Ambler District have been explored on and off for six decades since their discovery, the development of these resources has been hampered by the lack of a road to deliver the metal-rich concentrates to global markets.
To connect this mineral-rich district to Alaska's existing road and rail system, AIDEA is leading the permitting and development of an industrial access road that would extend 211 miles west from the Dalton Highway to the Ambler District.
"Establishing access through the Ambler Access Project has the potential to lead to up to five concurrent mine operations over time, which will have broad impacts to Alaska's existing transportation infrastructure," Weitzner added.
The quasi-state-owned development authority, however, wants to take a closer look at the entire Ambler Mining District transportation route – from the proposed mines to the roads leading to the north end of the Alaska railway in Fairbanks, and on to the ports in Southcentral Alaska.
"The access road to the Ambler Mining District is one part of the logistics chain," said AIDEA Board Chair Dana Pruhs. "We need to look at this holistically to identify and mitigate transportation bottlenecks."
Once trucks loaded with concentrates traverse the 211-mile road to be built by AIDEA, they must turn south and travel the Dalton and Elliot for another 225 miles to Fairbanks, where they can be loaded on railcars bound for ports in Southcentral Alaska.
All along this roughly 800-mile route across Alaska are roads, bridges, railway facilities, ports, and other infrastructure that need to be replaced, upgraded, or built new.
The AIDEA board has approved spending up to $250,000 for an independent firm to carry out a technical feasibility study that evaluates ore concentrate routes from the intersection of the Ambler Road and the Dalton Highway via rail to export terminals at Port MacKenzie in the Mat-Su Borough, as well as the ports in Anchorage, Seward, and Whittier.
This study comes at a time when Alaska is expected to receive more than $4 billion in federal funding through the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act and be eligible to compete with other states for additional funds available under the $1.2 billion infrastructure package signed into law by President Biden in November.
As a public corporation set up by the Alaska legislature in 1967 to promote, develop and advance the general prosperity and economic welfare of Alaskans, AIDEA has been involved in establishing access roads, ports, ore loading facilities, and other infrastructure across Alaska. Over the past 55 years, the development and export authority has directed more than $3.5 billion in economic development across the state and has paid $446 million in dividends from revenues generated from its endeavors into Alaska coffers since 1997.
Over his more than 16 years of covering mining and mineral exploration, Shane has become renowned for his ability to report on the sector in a way that is technically sound enough to inform industry insiders while being easy to understand by a wider audience.
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