Frank Murkowski is again pitching a rail link between Canada and Alaska, an old idea the former senator and governor worked on when he was in office.
Now Murkowski is back, as a special envoy working under the current governor to get talks on the rail link on track. He spoke at a luncheon Wednesday put on by World Trade Center Anchorage.
“You know, there’s a lot of potential in Alaska,” Murkowski said. “The problem always is getting it off the ground and getting it under way.”
The rail link would be used to export Canada’s vast deposits of bitumen, a black viscous mixture of hydrocarbons packed with energy.
“The bitumen that is in this huge deposit has been identified in volumes that are a little hard to comprehend, they’re so significant,” Murkowski said.
There are different proposed routes for the rail construction from Alberta to Alaska and also at least two options for where to take the bitumen from there.
One is to offload it in Interior Alaska at Delta Junction, treat it, ship it through the Trans-Alaska Pipeline to Valdez and, ultimately, Asian markets.
Another option is to send it by rail to Port MacKenzie in the Matanuska-Susitna Borough, which desperately needs a project of that scale to complete a rail link to the port and generate revenue. Bitumen exported from Port MacKenzie would also likely go to Asian markets.
Murkowski said there has been no decision made yet on whether Delta or Port Mac is the better option.
“Well, it could be both, very frankly,” Murkowski said. “The decision as to what route is going to be conceived, if indeed it is going to be developed, is going to be dependent on the economics, in other words, where do you get the highest return on your product?”
As for the overall rail link project, Murkowski said there are many more details to iron out before the old idea can become reality.
Casey Grove is host of Alaska News Nightly, a general assignment reporter and an editor at Alaska Public Media. Reach him at cgrove@alaskapublic.org. Read more about Casey here.
