Doing Business in Alaska (DBIA)

Alaska's People

• Description of cultures and web links. Sub-conversation about Native corporations
• Discussion of hubs linked to most likely commerce from those areas.
• Quick 101 on history with an eye towards economic booms – fur, fisheries, gold, timber, oil.

Alaska’s North Slope Prudhoe Bay oil field discovery in 1967 established Alaska as a world-class oil and gas location.  Productive oil and gas fields developed along the central North Slope. Today there is high potential for new onshore and offshore discoveries in the Arctic. Alaska is also experiencing a resurgence of activity from oil and gas fields on the Kenai Peninsula and offshore in the Cook Inlet.

Alyeska Pipeline Service Company and the Trans Alaska Pipeline System

Alyeska Pipeline Service Company, named after the Aleut word Alyeska meaning mainland, was established in 1970. Alyeska built and runs the Trans Alaska Pipeline System (TAPS). At the time, construction of the pipeline was the largest privately financed construction project ever attempted, and cost over $8 billion when complete. The 800-mile-long Trans Alaska Pipeline System (TAPS) was designed and constructed to move oil from the North Slope of Alaska to the northern most ice-free port in Valdez, AK. Oil tankers load Alaskan crude oil in Valdez. The Marine Terminal includes 18 oil storage tanks with a total capacity of over 9 million barrels. The Terminal has four tanker loading berths, two of which have special vapor control systems and remain in use today.

• Spurred by major environmental impacts from coal mining in the 1960's and 1970's, the U.S. Congress passed the Surface Mining Control and Reclamation Act in1977. This act completely restructured the way coal mining was regulated nationwide and greatly increased environmental oversight.
• The federal act also allowed individual states to develop coal regulatory program consistent with the federal legislation, and assume primacy over the federal program. Alaska chose to develop its own program, and enacted the Alaska Surface Coal Mining Control and Reclamation Act in 1983.