Anchorage Daily News

Some Alaska energy projects make a lot of sense: in-state natural gas, geothermal, tidal, wind and small-scale hydro come to mind. But some energy projects make no sense, and topping the list is the Chuitna River development proposed by PacRim Coal.

Billed as the second-largest open-pit coal mine in North America, the project would strip sub-bituminous coal below wetlands 12 miles up the Chuitna River and its Lone Creek tributary just north of Tyonek. The stripped coal would be transported on a conveyor belt to tidewater at Ladd Landing, site of an abandoned Dena'ina village adjacent to one of the early Cook Inlet canneries, and then out into the Inlet on a two-mile long trestle, where it would be loaded onto ships bound for China.

PacRim is a Delaware company with roots deep in Texas. It is part of a consortium of private companies that their Web site refers to as the Hunt Group, which owns Hunt Oil and Arch Coal among others. Arch Coal is the second-largest coal mining company in America and practices cost-effective but environmentally destructive mountaintop removal mining in Appalachia. The driving force within the Hunt Group is Ray L. Hunt, heir to the H.L. Hunt oil fortune, who, with his wife, contributed $277,000 to President Bush's 2004 reelection campaign. Bush subsequently appointed him to a seat on the Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board.

Hunt also has close ties to Vice President Cheney and recently held a seat on the Halliburton board of directors. In 2007, Hunt Oil struck a $10 billion deal with the Kurds to develop oil wells in Iraq, bypassing and thereby destabilizing the al-Maliki government. And we thought the Iraq war was about bringing democracy to an oppressed people.

PacRim's coal mine would potentially do some destabilization of a different kind. Their permit application states they would discharge 7 million gallons of mine waste a day into sedimentation ponds and then into the Chuitna River. The Lone Creek tributary would be completely mined over. A permit to wipe out a salmon stream has never been granted before, and to do so would establish a dangerous precedent. Their claims that they can re-establish the fish run sound ominously like those on the West Coast where salmon fishing is now shut down.

PacRim's published plans call for a road, airstrip, a 500,000-ton coal storage facility, and lodging for 350 workers on top of the Ladd Landing historic site -- erasing one more page in the powerful story of Cook Inlet history.

The primary market for Chuitna coal would be China, where it would be burned to generate electricity for China's burgeoning economy -- an economy that so far has not enacted standards limiting anthropogenetic global warming emissions. China will soon surpass the United States as the largest producer of carbon dioxide, the primary greenhouse gas, due mainly to burning dirty coal. It doesn't matter how many light bulbs we change or hybrids we drive as long as China's coal stacks keep billowing greenhouse gasses, some of it from Alaska if PacRim's permit is granted.

In 1957, Alaska military weather observers first identified the Arctic haze which turned out to be Asian dust and airborne industrial pollutants from Asia and Europe. We now know it takes six days for mercury and other coal emission pollutants to reach North America, where it falls on our land and water and makes its way though the food chain.

Last fall, Gov. Palin's administration advised Alaskans, particularly pregnant women, not to eat more than one serving per week of large halibut and other bottom fish because of mercury contamination. Mercury causes birth defects and neurological disease in adults; the main source of mercury contamination is coal combustion. The United States has made significant gains in scrubbing mercury compounds from bituminous coal emissions, and China could as well. But the type of mercury in sub-bituminous coal, like Chuitna coal, is more commonly elemental mercury, which cannot be effectively removed.

So the upshot of PacRim's proposed coal development would be; China gets the coal, we get back the mercury, global warming accelerates, a part of Alaska's history is lost, and another outside corporation makes a lot of money. All this for 350 jobs that can easily be absorbed by a bullet gas line or renewable energy projects.

Alan Boraas is a professor of anthropology at Kenai Peninsula College.

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