Permafrost

across the Yukon Territory and British Columbia into Alberta, where it would connect with
existing or newly built pipeline segments extending into the U.S. Midwest and California. 8
Collapse of ANGTS project and recent revival of interest
However, in the 1980s restructuring of gas-market institutions in both the U.S. and Canada
resulted in unanticipated increases in output from traditional gas-producing basins, deep
reductions in market prices, and a collapse in the continent’s perceived demand for natural gas
from new or high-cost sources including the North American Arctic. By 1984 these events had
caused an indefinite suspension of plans for Alaska and Yukon segments of the ANGTS pipeline
project. 9
Recent revival of interest
Since about 2003, however, retardation in replacement of conventional gas reserves in both the
U.S. and Canada, and major increases in prices of crude oil and refined oil products, have
revived active interest in gas-pipeline construction in North America’s Arctic regions.
This paper will review a set of critical pipeline route and design issues which, as of this
writing, 10 has received virtually no recognition in the ongoing public or official
discourse. 11 The latter issues include the relevance of distinctive soil conditions that
characterize the proposed pipeline routes, and implications of recent and anticipated of macro-
and micro-climatic changes on the physical and commercial viability of the various potential
pipeline routes.
Risk factors distinctive to pipeline viability.
All of the pipeline routes seriously considered either in the licensing contests of the 1970s, or in
contemporary deliberations, share or appear to share a particularly vexing set of features:
Any pipeline route pointed south or southeast from the Central Alaskan
Arctic or from the Beaufort-Yukon-Mackenzie gas-producing region tends
to be richly endowed with permafrost of exceptionally high ice content,
great depth, and frequent discontinuity. The foregoing generalization seems
valid almost anywhere between the Arctic shore and the 60 th Parallel or, in
any event, for much of a pipeline system’s most northerly thousand
kilometers.
It is also worth noting, inn addition, the specific zones characterized by these troublesome soil
conditions are often also exposed to extraordinary seismic or volcanic activity.
The highest-profile instance of renewed activity involves heated and publicly controversial
8
The 1977 plan also included a “Dempster cutoff” pipeline route directly south from the Beaufort/Mackenzie reserves,
along the Dempster highway to join the ANGTS Alaska Highway main line in Yukon Territory;
9 Some of the southern segments of ANGTS (south of the permafrost regions) were completed in the 1980s and now
operate profitably as conductors of Canadian gas exports to California or the United States Midwest.
10
March 2006.
11 Neither the implications of observed or projected changes of soil and ocean ice conditions, nor inferences from enhanced
access to Russian experience with buried pipelines in permafrost, since the mid-1970s seems to be evident in the public
record of current research or deliberations on high-latitude pipelines in North America.
14