Alaska
State profiting from higher prices for Alaska oil on U.S. West Coast – Chilkat Valley News
The first month of the U.S. war against Iran caused crude oil prices to skyrocket around the world, and the price of Alaska’s oil has risen particularly far.
That rise is making tens of millions of dollars, maybe a few hundred million dollars if high prices persist, available for state services and the Permanent Fund dividend, even as it squeezes the finances of individual Alaskans.
In figures newly compiled by the Alaska Department of Revenue, the average price of a barrel of Alaska North Slope (ANS) crude was $111.17 in April.
That’s $8.70 higher than the average price of a barrel of Brent crude, a benchmark price for Europe’s North Sea oil. It was also $13.11 per barrel higher than the average price of West Texas Intermediate, the benchmark for oil from America’s second-largest state.
“The differential is the largest monthly value since the year 2000 and may be the highest value in history,” said the Department of Revenue, referring to the gap between Brent and North Slope crude.
“The large premium is due to a tightness in the Pacific basin oil market, where ANS is traded,” the department said.
Alaska crude goes to refineries in Washington state and California, with a small volume delivered to a refinery in Nikiski on the Kenai Peninsula.
In addition to Alaska oil, U.S. West Coast refineries obtain their crude from Canada, North Dakota and California oil fields, and a substantial volume from overseas suppliers.
“Uncertainty about shipping and delivery is incentivizing refiners to pay a premium for available crude that does not transit areas with substantial security risks. Crude grades from the Americas are the safest option. Brent primarily trades in the Atlantic basin, where the impacts from the Iran war are not quite as pronounced on a barrel-for-barrel basis.”
The premium now being paid for Alaska crude will have a significant impact on the state treasury if it continues for months.
Each $1 increase in the average price of a barrel of ANS crude for a full year is worth roughly $30 million to $50, depending on the price.
While more than half of the state’s general-purpose revenue now comes from the Alaska Permanent Fund’s investments, oil is still the No. 2 source of flexible spending money for the state, and prices — combined with production — cause the amount of available money to flex up and down each year.
Legislative budgeters write the state spending plan with an average crude price in mind for an entire fiscal year, from July 1 through June 30 of the following year.
In the current fiscal year, which ends June 30, the Department of Revenue expects prices to average $75.26 per barrel.
Thanks in part to the Alaska premium, the average through May 5 was $75.71. Every day that prices stay above that level, the more unexpected money the state will receive.
The state Senate already has a plan for that extra money.
The first $96 million would go to an “energy relief” payment that increases the amount of the 2026 Permanent Fund dividend by $150 per Alaskan. The next $111 million would be distributed to public schools, and anything above that would go into the state’s principal savings account, the Constitutional Budget Reserve.
While Alaska’s state treasury is receiving a boon from the high prices, legislators don’t expect it to last. In the fiscal year that starts July 1, they’re anticipating significantly lower average North Slope oil prices.
“The Senate operating budget, when combined with spending agreements for the capital budget, balances the budget on $73/barrel oil, with some money left over,” said Bethel Sen. Lyman Hoffman, co-chair of the Senate Finance Committee, speaking about the Senate’s budget proposal on May 6.
Yukon king salmon on their Canadian spawning grounds more than 1,400 miles from the Bering Sea/Pacific Salmon Foundation photo
Yukon king salmon rebound beginning?
After a couple of years with cooler waters in the Bering Sea, the Alaska Department of Fish and Game is reporting a Yukon River return of Chinook salmon that has, as of the start of the month, “passed the historical third quarter point and exceeded preseason projections.”
The report comes at a time when National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) researchers have linked the extremely weak returns of the past several years to the start of “an acute marine heatwave period in the Bering Sea” that began late in 2016 and extended into 2020.
Yukon Chinook, the oversized salmon that most Alaskans simply call kings, were the big losers in this warming event while Bristol Bay sockeye salmon were the big winners. This is what happens when environmental conditions change, though you might not know it if all you read is highly subjective, mainstream media reporting on “global warming.”
The planet’s warming climate is an environmental disruptor that can cause all kinds of problems for plants and animals, and even humans, but it is a two-edged sword because that is the way environmental shifts work. There are losers, but there are also winners.
And there is no doubt the planet is warming. The big debate is about how much the future increase and how fast it comes. Scientists this year ruled out the sky-is-falling warning of a temperature increase of more than six to almost 10 degrees by 2021.
But as the Climate Directorate for the European Commission notes, the latest, ” most optimistic path – the new ‘best case scenario’ – would still lead to global warming of 1.7° C, (3.06° F) temporarily exceeding the 1.5° C (2.7° F) target in the Paris Agreement” on climate change.
What exactly this means for Yukon Chinook is hard to say, given that Arctic Ocean warming of late has focused more in the Barents Sea off the north coast of Europe than in the Chukchi and Bering seas off Alaska. The odds, however, would seem to favor a continued bounty of Bay sockeye while Chinook to the north continue to struggle.
The Alaska Department of Fish and Game is this year forecasting a Bay harvest of 33.5 million sockeye from a total return of 45.3 million of the fish. This is a historically very strong run, but it pales when compared to what happened during those heat wave years when Yukon Chinook were fading.
A sockeye explosion
In 2022, the Bay witnessed an unprecedented return of 79 million sockeye, according to state data, and the harvest topped 60 million. Meanwhile, there was over-escapement in almost every river system in the region because the harvesting and processing resources in the Bay couldn’t handle a return so big.
Escapement is the number of fish getting past fishermen to make it back to their spawning grounds. It is a scientifically calculated number intended to produce the greatest return of salmon per spawner in future years.
The goal in the Bay is to put about 11.8 million salmon on the spawning grounds. The escapement in 2022 was about 7.2 million over the goal even though the harvest that year dwarfed the previous record harvest of 44.3 million set in 1995.
The 16.2 million difference between the two, record harvests was bigger than the total harvests for all but two seasons in the Bay from 1938 to 1979 when the North Pacific Ocean was filled with colder water.
A so-called “regime change” at sea in the 1980s altered marine survival and sockeye harvests in the Bay – home to the largest wild sockeye fishery in the world and one of only a handful of Alaska fisheries that can claim to catch truly ‘wild’ salmon – began to explode.
By the end of the 2021 fishing season, the five-year average harvest had reached 41.1 million sockeye; the 10-year average stood at 33.4 million; and the 20-year average stood at 29.4 million, nearly double the historic, long-term average of 16.2 million.
The good, old days for Bay fishermen have come in the here and now, despite a catastrophic drop in prices paid for Bay salmon since farmed, Atlantic salmon took over global markets at the start of the new millennium.
Alaska sockeye salmon, and especially those increasingly rare Alaska king salmon, have hung onto a niche in the premium market dominated by farmed salmon, but the bulk of the Alaska harvest is now made up of so-called ‘wild caught’ salmon that compete globally with ‘wild-caught’ Russian salmon in markets for canned and pouched salmon and smallish pink salmon filets.
The ‘wild-caught’ label is used to disguise the fact that many of these fish are products of hatchery operations in Alaska and Russia. They are as wild, or not, as cattle put out to pasture to fatten. And the same applies to some non-Bay sockeye, such as those coming from hatcheries in Alaska’s Prince William Sound.
Bay salmon are a different story. These are truly wild salmon, and there is no doubt that they have benefited from warming.
Not all good
The same warning, however, has proven disastrous for Yukon Chinook and the people who once depended on them for cash and food. The commercial fisheries that produced cash have been closed for years, and subsistence harvests for food have been sharply limited.
Alaska catches fell to less than 20,000 kings per year on average in this decade, and with a serious downward trend underway, the U.S. and Canada in 2024 signed an agreement to suspend “directed Chinook commercial, sport, domestic, and personal use fisheries in the mainstem Yukon River and Canadian tributaries for one full life cycle (of) seven years.”
Alaskans fishing the Yukon for chum salmon, which are comparatively far more abundant, do still harvest some kings as bycatch, but the number is small. And harvests, whether in-river or at sea, do not, according to the NOAA researchers, seem to be the key problem facing the Yukon fish.
The scientists reported finding that “elevated natural mortality in later, post-juvenile life history stages has increasingly limited population productivity and recovery potential in recent years following a protracted marine heatwave period. Collectively, our results emphasize how shifting conditions can induce, novel stage-specific survival bottlenecks in species with complex life cycles.”
Their peer-reviewed study published in Ecological Applications, the journal of the Ecological Society of America, has, however, come under fire from Alaskans who don’t want to believe the data and prefer to blame the decline on the bycatch of Yukon Chinook offshore trawl fisheries targeting pollock and bottomfish.
Former Rep. Mary Peltola, D-Alaska, from Bethel near the mouth of the Yukon in rural Western Alaska, has repeatedly dissed the science. She is now running for the U.S. Senate seat held by Sen. Dan Sullivan, R-Alaska, and continuing to do so.
“I’ve seen the decline of our fisheries firsthand. I’ve seen our families suffer. And I’ve seen our fishermen have their livelihoods threatened. I’m running for Senate because it doesn’t have to be this way. We can take on the rigged system in D.C. and begin to restore abundance to Alaska,” she has said.
She contends that “the truth is that out-of-state factory trawlers and excessive bycatch are hurting Alaska. They are sweeping up more than 140 million pounds of bycatch….But instead of reining in the trawling industry, Alaska subsistence and sport fishing are hit with crushing restrictions, punishing Alaskans while protecting the corporations doing the damage.
“Instead of holding their corporate trawler donors accountable, D.C. politicians kick the can down the road with more studies. But we don’t need more studies to tell us what’s happening in front of our eyes.”
Whatever Peltola might see in front of her eyes, the scientists say there is no evidence that it is a bycatch problem. After modeling a huge pile of historical data, they concluded that ending all bycatch would put some more Chinook in the Yukon River, but not many more.
A few hundred fish
Simulations using various sizes of salmon returns to the Yukon showed that “the greatest difference occurred in 2007, in which the median run size from the zero-bycatch simulations was 433 fish greater than that of the fitted model,” they said. “In other years, median differences in run size between the fitted model and zero-bycatch simulations ranged from 32 to 398 fish.”
Basically, the models concluded what has long been observable. Bycatch numbers go up when Chinook are abundant and go down when Chinook are scarce. The Bering Sea pollock fishery, the biggest target of the anti-trawling campaign, posted a record bycatch of 122,195 Chinook in 2007, according to the North Pacific Management Council.
That now oft-cited number was an anomaly. It reflected a year when Chinook were unusually abundant in the region. The bycatch dropped to 20,000 the next year.
For the past decade, according to NPFMC data, the average stands at just shy of 19,000 fish per year. Genetic studies have shown these fish come from rivers all over North America, but the greatest proportion comes from Western Alaska rivers.
If bycatch could be wholly eliminated, the NPFMC estimates there would be an almost 2 percent improvement in the number of Chinook returning to those streams. As for the Yukon itself, the estimated improvement is 0.63 percent.
Such a change would be undetectable. The state sonar used to count salmon at Pilot Station on the Yukon has a “confidence level” of 90 percent. What this means is that the count is an estimate that comes from within a range that could be 10 percent higher or lower than the number judged to be the total return.
The numbers make the politics of the bycatch, at least as it applies to the pollock fishery in the Bering Sea, a classic red herring. There are no doubt some king salmon die when caught in trawls in the Eastern Bering Sea (EBS), but that fishery also happens to be the most intensely monitored fishery in the state.
The NOAA researchers noted that the trawl fleet has, since 2011, “been subject to 100 percent fishery observer coverage with full census counts of all salmon caught, and paired genetic and scale samples collected from one in 10 fish.”
Most Alaska fisheries operate without observers, and Alaska commercial salmon fishermen have opposed efforts to fit their boats with video cameras to provide remote monitoring because, according to the Southeast Alaska Seiners Association, “commercial permit holders are extremely sensitive to the confidential nature of
their fishing activities. Many see this program as opening their catch data to a number of unknown entities.”
The biggest of those “entities” would be the public. The state now hides data on how much money individual commerical salmon fishermen are making by mining the ocean for a common property resource and does not require they to report bycatch – such as starry flounder in Cook Inlet – that they discard.
Meanwhile, critics of the Bering Sea fishery claim that the federal monitoring now in place isn’t perfect, which is true, and argue that the Chinook bycatch could be significantly underreported. But even if observers were underreporting the catch by 100 percent, the improvement in the Yukon return would rise by only about 1.2 percent, according to the NOAA study, leaving it still well below the ability of the state sonar to detect a change.
Not that this is likely to alter the bycatch rant.
The Covid-19 pandemic days of “listen to the scientists” are now over, and Alaska has returned ot the days of people listening to what they want to believe, and some people – Peltola among them – deeply want to believe that the Yukon River would be full of salmon if the largest of U.S. fisheries – the pollock fishery – were shut down.
That weather and climate dictate how natural systems function is a hard thing to grasp in a now very urban America, where most people are out of touch with the natural world.
Categories: News, Outdoors
Arraignment of Amos Lane in District Court
Utqiagvik (formerly Barrow), Alaska
August 6, 1993
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When I pushed open the heavy gray doors of the courtroom, heads turned toward me as though it were a wedding, but nobody smiled. I wished I weren’t dragging a suitcase, but I’d come straight from the airport because my office said arraignment had already begun. I stashed the suitcase in a back corner and headed up the aisle.
The courtroom usually sat empty on a Friday morning, and usually was as quiet as a church, which it resembled with its pinstriped gray carpeting and blond wood spectator pews. Instead of an altar, we had a judge’s bench and jury box. Today the place was standing room only, and it buzzed with the murmurs of impatient spectators.
“Amos Lane is his name,” Liz, our office manager, had said when she phoned me in South Carolina in the middle of my first vacation in three years. “They’re holding him on misdemeanors now, but they think he killed the Ipalook sisters.”
“The Ipalook sisters!”
Fred Ipalook Elementary School in Utqiagvik was named for the family patriarch, the first Inupiaq (formerly called Eskimo) school principal.
“Both of them strangled, one raped,” Liz said.
I was standing in my parents’ kitchen, looking through the magnolia trees blooming on their lawn, trying to register what Liz was saying.
“Listen…I know you haven’t been out in a while,” she went on. “Do you want me to have Anchorage send somebody up temporary?”
It took me a while to answer.
“No, I’ll come. It’s my territory.”
My parents’ friends had asked me why I went so far away to defend people who might be dangerous. I had two explanations. The first involved money, the second was hard to explain, so I usually tried to change the subject.
The first was that my daughter was in law school and my son had just started college. Financial aid departments were generous to a widow like me, with meager resources, but the schools were still expensive. I learned that oil-rich Alaska provided good salaries for public defenders, especially if you were willing to go to a bush office, so I sold the old farmhouse near Olympia, Washington, that had been our family home for eleven years; managed to get through the Alaska bar exam; and moved to Arctic Alaska.
The second answer was that the midnight sun and the polar night and the white owls and white bears and white foxes of the Arctic fascinated me. Especially the white owls.
Public Safety officers filled the back pews. Their presence tended to put pressure on the magistrate to set a high bail. I knew it would be part of my job today to remind the court and the prosecutor that we were only here on misdemeanors. My new client might be a suspect in these shocking murders but had not been charged with them. No one had.
I spotted Ed Ellingsworth, local lead detective, his cadaverous frame drooping over a corner of a pew. A young female reporter sat beside him, plump and giggly. I rather liked the way she never spelled the district attorney’s name right. The name was Slusser, but she always wrote Slusher. She also garbled some Inupiat words, and used k, q, and g interchangeably, but so did a lot of people. The language is not yet entirely standardized, but then, neither is English. At least she had learned that Inupiat was a noun and Inupiaq an adjective.
Words that still confused me were the names of the area. When I first arrived, I was told that historic areas in the middle of town were referred to as “Ukpeagvik,” with a “p,” and that the name meant “place where the snowy owls gather.” How lovely, I thought—both the name and the glorious creatures themselves. At the time, the town was called Barrow, a proper British name, but then the townspeople voted to return to the ancient name of Utqiagvik, or “place where roots are dug.” No doubt both names are accurate, and the difference between them perhaps neither the reporter nor I will ever fully understand, but I preferred the owls.
Two entire middle pews were occupied by members of the Ipalook family, looking stricken and exhausted. There were also many spectators who came to court out of boredom. Utqiagvik didn’t have a movie theater. In the front row, there was a group of young women in summer parkas, some with babies folded inside their front zippers.
A faint, comforting scent of seal cooking oil pervaded the room.
My new client, Amos Lane—it would have to be him—sat alone in handcuffs at the defense table, bearing the angry stares at his back. All I could see was that he was a Native man with long black hair and muscular shoulders wearing an orange jumpsuit, and that he needed some company. I passed through the pony gate in the bar and took my place beside him.
His eyes flicked sideways over me, and I saw in his glance that he lumped public defenders together with bailiffs, clerks, police, DAs, judges, and everyone else who put him and kept him in jail.
“You’re Amos Lane? My name’s Rebecca Wright. I’m the public defender for the North Slope Borough. Let’s see what we’ve got.”
Alaska is divided into boroughs rather than counties. The North Slope Borough, an area the size of Wyoming, occupies the northern tier of the state. The Inupiat control the North Slope Borough financially and politically. While many teachers, doctors, and lawyers are taniks, non-Natives, they serve at the pleasure of Native authorities—and may be, and have been, asked to leave if they don’t serve well.
Without a word, Amos passed me the mess of papers in front of him. There were two misdemeanor complaints filed yesterday, and a petition for misdemeanor probation revocation filed instanter. Now.
The first complaint declared Lane was the subject of a citizen’s arrest by one Harold Killbear, whom he had assaulted.
He whispered, “That’s bullshit. The guy was beating up his girlfriend and I stopped him, is all. I got witnesses.”
I shrugged.
What struck me about the complaint was the “citizen’s arrest” part. It signified that no law enforcement officer had witnessed Lane committing any crime. To arrest on a misdemeanor, according to Alaska law, an officer actually had to see the offense happening. Otherwise, the defendant could only be summoned to come into court at a later time. But Killbear could file his own complaint and ask for assistance in taking anyone into custody right away.
I recalled that Killbear himself had appeared in court some weeks previously on a charge of DUI. I wondered, if I ever made it so far as my office this morning, whether I would find that the case against Killbear had been opportunely dismissed.
I felt my hackles rising. It was bad enough for Lane to sit alone in a courtroom of people who wanted somebody, anybody, to be jailed for a serious crime, without Public Safety piling on fake charges. I wished I’d had a chance to read over the file or even just talk to him before the hearing. The initial stages of a case of this magnitude had to be done right.
And I would have liked to tell Mr. Lane my initial reaction to the Killbear complaint, but we couldn’t afford to appear to furtively conspire in front of the crowd. Utqiagvik was so small that each and every person in the courtroom was a potential juror.
“I’ve heard of you,” Lane muttered.
He didn’t say whether what he’d heard was good or bad.
I gave him a polite smile. “I’ve heard of you, too,” I said, “all the way to South Carolina.” Lane started to inquire what I had heard, but I held up a hand and focused on the next charge.
In this complaint, Johnny Aveoganna accused Lane of stealing some ivory from his home. Uh-huh. I knew Aveoganna. He was a talented and prolific carver of ivory, a friendly and generous man, and a heavy drinker. He sold a lot of ivory. I had bought from him myself, a classic polar bear carved from part of a walrus tusk, and a smaller gull and a seal of fossilized ivory. He also gave away a lot of his work, especially to friends who dropped by for a drink.
If Public Safety had found some ivory signed by Aveoganna in Lane’s possession, he could be accused of stealing it. At trial Aveoganna could explain the ivory was a gift. Even if Amos had, in fact, stolen the ivory, the easygoing Johnny might call it a gift, just for old times’ sake.
On the other hand, Aveoganna’s ivory was not the tourist-trinket kind that sold cheaply in Anchorage. Its real value could kick the charge up from misdemeanor into felony if Public Safety decided they really wanted Lane and couldn’t find anything else with which to hold him, at least until the grand jury met to indict someone in the murder case. Hopefully, as an ultimate last resort, an Utqiagvik trial jury of people who knew Aveoganna as Lane and I did, and Fairbanks didn’t, would make short work of the charge.
“Mr. Lane, are you on any kind of parole or probation status?”
“No. I maxed out.”
Only the hardcore went the route of serving every day of their suspended time, the time that would be held over their heads when they were released to parole. That Lane had served every day told me that he didn’t want anybody, anywhere, having a leash on him.
I picked up the remaining papers, a misdemeanor probation revocation petition, with two fingers and looked at him inquisitively.
“That was just this stupid fight write-up I caught right before I got out. The guy lied. They were going to charge it as a felony, but then we copped this deal and I pled to it as a misdemeanor. They did it mostly so they could release me into alcohol treatment instead of the street.”
My head had begun to ache. What he was saying could be true. A lot of inmate squabbles, or misunderstandings by guards, led to empty charges. On the other hand, his previous record might show that he was a dangerous drunk who tended to get violent, and that whatever parole or probation officer had tried to guide him into treatment was doing the right thing.
Beyond those considerations, I grew puzzled that nowhere in this stack of paper was there any reference to the deaths of the two sisters. I had missed a birthday celebration and flown 3,800 miles to represent Amos Lane. If Liz was right and this guy was a suspect in the case, so far no one had come up with any evidence against him. Liz was Inupiaq herself, and she and her extended family members always knew what had happened, who was accused, and who was probably guilty.
Unlike Public Safety, I might add.
I studied his face. “Mr. Lane, I don’t recall seeing you in court before. You’re not from Utqiagvik, are you.”
It was not a question.
“No way,” he said. “I’m from Point Hope.”
Utqiagvik was on the northern edge of Alaska and was in fact the northernmost community in the United States. Point Hope was home to a few hundred people on the western rim, so remote it made Utqiagvik seem like a world hub. The people of Point Hope had once successfully resisted the federal government’s plan of detonating a thermonuclear device to create a harbor on their coast.
Good for them.
Point Hope is also one of the oldest continually inhabited communities on the North American continent. Inupiat have lived there 2,500 years.
***
Excerpted from Sisters of the Midnight Sun: A Murder in Arctic Alaska. By Rebecca Wright Stevens. Copyright 2026. Reprinted with permission. All rights reserved.
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