Port leasing space to half-dozen companies

POINT MACKENZIE — Construction contractors, a logistics company and a tank farm are all leasing space at the Mat-Su Borough’s port right now.

Port Director Marc Van Dongen said that a lot of the leases on office space are seasonal. The ferry terminal building at the port tends to fill up each summer and empty out each winter. As far as leases on port land, rather than on port office space goes, here’s the list Van Dongen outlined:

• Alutiiq Manufacturing leases a parcel where it builds modular housing.

• NPI, formerly North Pacific Inc., and formerly in the woodchip business, is using its port lease to house a heavy equipment yard.

• Central Alaska Energy has a lease on which it is working toward building a fuel tank farm.

In the ferry terminal, Van Dongen said, there are leases to a contractor working on the borough’s Point MacKenzie Rail Extension — Hanson Engineering — and one of its subcontractors — R & M Consultants.

Also in the terminal — PacArctic Logistics, which actually doesn’t exist anymore. Van Dongen said that PacArctic was a subsidiary of Koniag Inc., which gave PacArctic the axe when the company disbanded a lot of its subsidiaries.

“We have a new company now that has the same general manager,” Van Dongen said.

That company, WestPac LLC, is working to take over the lease on office space and also on port district property previously leased to PacArctic.

“That’s a logistics company just like PacArctic was, and he’s already mobilized a 175-ton crane that’s on the dock already,” Van Dongen said.

“We’ve got a contract with Crowley out of Houston. They’re bringing in 14 miles of concrete-coated pipe to our port this summer for a pipeline project out of Nikiski,” Van Dongen said.

Those pipes will be offloaded on the borough’s barge dock from a cargo ship — with an assist from WestPac — and then loaded onto smaller vessels for transport to Nikiski.

“It’s about a three-month project,” Van Dongen said.

As for Central Alaska Energy’s fuel tank farm, Van Dongen said that it’s not clear exactly when construction will begin.

“When they bid it out a couple of months ago, their bids all came back higher than what their estimate was,” he said.

When that happens, a company is left to either look for more money or reduce the size of its project. In the case of a fuel tank farm, the company could build fewer tanks but be able to handle as much fuel. The tanks would just need to be refilled more often. Central Alaska Energy is figuring out its next move, Van Dongen said.

“Their intent is to build the tanks this year, and they’re hoping to get them filled by the fall. But it might not be until next spring,” he said.

As with any time he talks about goings-on at the port, Van Dongen’s list of activities included a long discussion about the future.

“In one three-week window that we had in, I think it was 2009, we barged 185 barge loads of gravel over to the Port of Anchorage expansion project and in three weeks we made a profit of $832,000 just from that one commodity — sand and gravel — going across for three weeks,” he said.

The rail spur coming to Point MacKenzie has the potential to far surpass even that high-water mark in the port’s revenue generation, he said. Van Dongen said pointed to things like metals and limestone. A limestone deposit north of Fairbanks, he said, has enough stone to make 800 million tons of cement.

“That’s 4 million tons a year for 200 years,” he said.

Just 3 million tons of a commodity per year would add 75 percent to the Alaska Railroad’s yearly revenue, giving a boost to a state-controlled corporation that has in recent years been laying people off more than it has hired them.

“That’s the reason we’re building our port. It’s for exporting natural resources,” Van Dongen said.

Contact Andrew Wellner at 352-2270 or andrew.wellner@frontiersman.com.