Railroad route is a gas

A Spectrum, by Hal Engelstad

Cost-wise, it's quite plain to see it's indisputable a gas line down the railroad to Seward would win on all counts.

Is it political, generated by personal self-interest, paid lobbyist groups that the entire Southcentral Alaskan residents are deprived of the common sense of having local governments to join in a vast effort to grant Alaskans a very cheap method of home heating, for just one? The "bleed" suffered by the seasonal workers on unemployment compensation, the minimum wage workers, casts a huge number of the Alaskan residents into a welfare status without a self-applied, correctional bandage in sight.

At a future date, the dock at Nenana can be used for barging liquified gas to the Yukon River to Bethel as a distribution point to the Seward Peninsula and down to the Bristol Bay areas.

To lay the gas line from Fairbanks to Seward along the rail road would save in the hundreds of millions per mile, in some areas. The mode of pipe-laying costs are held to a minimum with the use of rail flat cars. The line can hang from the railroad bridge at Nenana. The same with the highway/railroad crossing at Hurricane. The big plus would be the existing Seward dock system that was vacated from use by the discontinued coal shipments from Healy to the Orient.

In case of traffic and iceberg danger, as in Prince William Sound, a leaden ship can steam from Seward and be in the open sea in a very short time. Remember Bligh Reef? The unloading of the pipe would be directly from a ship onto rail flat cars in a single swing of a boom. Contrast this simplicity against the costly trucking, and in many cases hoisting pipe by helicopter.

The cost differential of anything other than gas-line-head at the existing idle dock at Seward would indicate political, adverse pandering which can only be weighed one against the other with just a wee bit of common sense. At the cost of just one of those roads to a seemingly nowhere nightmare for the sole purpose of jobs for the time being, as suggested by Murkowski, the gas line to Seward would be in full operation in half the time it would take to just study the feasibility of a road to Nome, for instance. There is a mystery surrounding my effort in getting anyone interested in the Fairbanks/Seward route for the gas line. Despite that the savings can be in the hundreds of millions, if not billions, not counting what can be years in time saving, resulting today in uncountable losses toward our state revenue.

In an attempt to raise interest in the common sense of a Fairbanks/Seward gas line route, I have contacted the office of the Resource Development Council in Anchorage, once with the initial suggestion along with two phone calls without so much as a courtesy reply. Can you figure it? I can't.

There are so many other advantages to low-cost energy to the Mat-Su Valley, especially in year-round agriculture, for one. The ramifications will be waiting far beyond what technology will allow.

Hall Engelstad is a Wasilla resident.