PORT OF CALL

PORT MacKENZIE — Mat-Su Borough officials called it a milestone, and it likely was both for the Mat-Su’s fledgling port and for a coal company seeking to mine near Sutton.

The JP Azure loaded up a test shipment of Healy coal Friday that Usibelli Coal trucked to Port MacKenzie for the occasion.

“It went very well,” Usibelli spokeswoman Lorali Carter said Saturday at a meeting of VIPs at the port.

Port Director Marc Van Dongen agreed. He noted that coal is the fifth commodity to cross the borough’s docks. The other four were wood chips, sand and gravel, cement and scrap metal.

All-told, something like 1,200 tons of Healy coal was loaded at Port MacKenzie. The ship showed up with 77,000 tons loaded in Seward. Carter said trucking a shipload of coal from Healy to Port MacKenzie would not have been cost effective. This was, after all, a test run, to see if the conveyors and the dock would work for bringing coal ships up to load up with Sutton coal.

But, Van Dongen noted, it will be if and when the borough gets a rail line to the port.

“To be efficient at exporting large volumes of commodities we’ve got to have rail bringing it down,” Van Dongen said.

Borough Assemblyman Ron Arvin works for NPI, which used the conveyors at the port to ship wood chips, and said the conveyors bringing coal to the Azure were the same NPI used, though they did have to tweak them a bit to make them run efficiently.

Van Dongen said the $35 million left in the state’s capital budget after Gov. Sean Parnell trimmed $22 million from the Port MacKenzie rail project will keep things on track, though it might mean a slight delay.

On the occasion of the coal ship docking at the port — the largest vessel ever to dock in the Upper Cook Inlet — Van Dongen was ready to talk long-range planning. He noted that there are 1.6 billion tons of high-grade limestone near Livengood, right off the Haul Road, just waiting for a rail line so it can be mined.

He said that deposit could provide all of the limestone to make all of Alaska’s cement and meet 15 percent of the Lower 48’s needs for 100 years or more.

Aside from the rail line, another thing Van Dongen is waiting for is an expansion of his dock. Part of that project, which will beef up the port’s barge dock, is going to be funded with federal money and is due to start construction Monday. Next he’d like to see the deep-draft dock, the one the Azure tied up at, expanded.

“Our docks are halfway done,” he said.

In general, he said, he doesn’t see Port MacKenzie competing directly with Anchorage. Port MacKenzie is in the export game. The Port of Anchorage deals mainly in imports. Though, he said, Port MacKenzie has imported cement, which did ruffle some feathers on the other side of the Inlet. He claims that bringing in the cement is currently saving contractors $8 million per year on construction costs.

And in the longest of long-term plans, Van Dongen said he sees containers loaded atop ships with cargo holds offloaded in Anchorage and filled up with export commodities at his port. Right now, he pointed out, a lot of ships have wait two weeks to offload at Lower 48 ports. If Alaska could build a rail line through Canada, those ships could come here.

“The toughest part is getting started. I think we’ve got a good start right here,” Van Dongen said.

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