Every few weeks this winter, 75-year-old Harvey Joe, an Yup’ik elder in the Western Alaska village of Hooper Bay, climbed onto his snowmachine.
Dragging a sled with a fuel drum on top, he’d bump 20 miles across the tundra to the neighboring village of Chevak.
In Hooper Bay, on the shore of the Bering Sea far from Alaska’s road system, fuel for Joe’s home heating stove cost $9.24 a gallon and unleaded gas was $8.44 in May.
In Chevak, heating fuel was a few bucks cheaper — meaning that each 30-gallon load could save Joe $75.
Across the country, consumers are contending with sharply higher fuel prices amid a global crude oil supply crunch brought on by the closure of a key strait in the Middle East — the result of President Donald Trump’s military action against Iran.
But even residents of California, where $6-a-gallon gas prices are making headlines, would face sticker shock if they traveled to Hooper Bay, or any of the dozens of other villages and hub towns across Western Alaska. Even before the conflict, dozens of rural communities across the state faced gas and heating fuel prices above $7 a gallon.
“They should come out here,” said George Nanuk, another elder in Hooper Bay, who took a 100-mile snowmachine trip a few months ago to gather logs to keep his house warm. “You’d be crying at the gas station.”
Western Alaska’s rural, coastal communities typically get an entire year’s worth of fuel delivered by barge during the summer.
The last summer delivery locks in prices for the fall, winter and spring — until ice and weather allow for the next year’s first summer shipment, when the price changes again.
That means prices in Hooper Bay are set to rise sharply when the first delivery arrives.
Much of Western Alaska’s supply comes in tankers from Asia, where markets have been most acutely disrupted by the closure of the Strait of Hormuz.
In late May and early June, barges began making their initial deliveries, and more rural buyers have placed their orders. The resulting prices are giving the first glimpse of the scale of what leaders from Bristol Bay to the Bering Strait describe as an unfolding crisis that threatens the viability of their communities — which remain deeply dependent on fossil fuels.
While the region’s Native residents have preserved many elements of their traditional lifestyles, communities need refined fuels for heating, electricity, transportation and to run the snowmachines and boats used for subsistence harvesting.
In early June, in the Bristol Bay hub town of Dillingham, gas prices rose to more than $9 a gallon from less than $7 this winter. In some remote areas, they’re set to rise to more than $10 a gallon.
“This is something that could completely wipe out rural Alaska,” said Nathan Hill, tribal president of the village of Kokhanok.
The village, on the shore of Iliamna Lake in the Bristol Bay region, expects to charge $15 for a gallon of heating fuel once its summer shipment arrives, up from the current price of $10, according to its utility manager.
The expense reflects the logistics of getting the fuel to Kokhanok. It starts on the road system on the Kenai Peninsula, where it’s loaded onto tanker trucks, which are boated across Cook Inlet, driven along a 15-mile portage road and finally loaded back onto another vessel for the trip along Iliamna Lake to Kokhanok.
Even at last winter’s $10 heating fuel price, Hill said he got phone calls from families who couldn’t make ends meet.
Traditional harvests
modern technology
Many seasonal rhythms of life in Hooper Bay, population 1,375, still look much like they have for thousands of years.
In the spring, hunters leave the village in small boats to harvest seals, walrus and beluga whales, while others stay closer to home to gather seabird eggs.
In summer, the salmon arrive and the berries ripen, and in the fall some residents range far from the village to look for moose, with harvests shared with family and friends.
The average Hooper Bay household gathered some 1,485 pounds of food in 2021, or 330 pounds per person, according to the most recent state data available.
“It’s all about chipping in, as a family, to get this and that,” said Marlin Lake, 34, an avid harvester and father of five in Hooper Bay.
These local harvests, referred to across Alaska’s Native communities as subsistence, are essential in rural villages where groceries must otherwise be flown or barged in, often commanding steep prices.
At Hooper Bay’s local grocery store in June, Lake pointed out grapes — a luxury in rural Alaska — selling for $7.99 a pound, and half-gallon cartons of milk selling for $9, twice what they go for in Anchorage.
Subsistence can help avoid those expenses. But rural Alaska harvests depend on modern technology — specifically, on motors powered by fossil fuels.
Last winter, one Hooper Bay man, Mason Nanuk, said he put 6,000 miles on his snowmachine for subsistence and other outings — including regular trips of 20 miles each way to check his ice fishing net. Lake said he’ll buy 130 gallons of gas — worth $1,100 at current prices — before a long boat trip up to the Yukon River to hunt moose.
Meanwhile, diesel powers Hooper Bay’s electrical grid and fuels residents’ Toyostoves, which are used widely for home heating across rural Alaska.
The four-wheelers that people drive around town run on unleaded gas, as do the pickup trucks that ferry people the mile to the community’s dirt airstrip.
Add a few dollars per gallon to the current fuel price, Nanuk said, and “that’s going to be a lot harder to do more subsistence or even continue to do what I like to do.”
“I’m trying not to think about it,” said Nanuk, 36.
Asian supply disrupted
Hooper Bay’s link to the global petroleum market is the thin yellow pipeline that runs from the shore to the village fuel tanks operated by Crowley, an international shipping and energy company based in Florida that serves some 90 communities in Western Alaska.
In recent years, Crowley and Vitus, the region’s other main supplier, have acquired gas and heating fuel from refineries in Asia; the products are then loaded onto foreign-flagged tankers, which are less expensive to charter than U.S.-flagged vessels.
The tankers then steam across the Pacific toward Alaska, where they’ll idle in federal waters several miles offshore so they don’t have to develop state-level oil spill contingency plans, according to Bernie Nowicki, who monitors the ships in his job as a regulator at the Alaska Department of Environmental Conservation.
Crowley and Vitus offload gas and diesel from the tankers at sea into their own barges, which are paired with tugboats. The fuel is then ferried to individual communities, sometimes far up rivers, as the tankers move along the coast — a logistically complex choreography that plays out over the course of the summer.
“They’ll finish up their list, and then by the end of October the tankers are gone; the tugs and barges, they’re back in their wintering locations,” Nowicki said.
The resulting prices are typically far higher than those paid by drivers in Alaska’s road system communities. Last winter, gas was $7.11 in Teller, near the Bering Strait; $8.71 in Mountain Village, on the Yukon River; and $7.56 in Togiak, in the Bristol Bay region, according to a state survey.
A Crowley spokesperson, Torey Vogel, said fuel prices in Western Alaska are driven by global fuel prices and availability, long-distance marine transportation, shallow-draft barging, seasonal storage, regulatory compliance and a short, ice-free window for deliveries.
“Many Western Alaska locations cannot be resupplied year-round, requiring fuel to be purchased, transported, stored and positioned well ahead of winter demand,” Vogel wrote in an email. “That creates a very different cost structure than locations connected to highway, pipeline, rail or larger-volume supply chains.”
Alaska has just three oil refineries, and their limited capacity is geared toward producing unleaded gas, jet fuel and diesel for road system customers.
‘At the mercy’
of markets
Local officials across Western Alaska and in other rural areas of the state are now girding themselves for price increases — with the scale of the hit still uncertain in some communities.
In Nome, the hub town just south of the Bering Strait, the electric utility has a contract with Crowley for more than 1.5 million gallons of diesel, according to John Handeland, the utility’s manager.
But the exact cost isn’t yet known because it’s set by a 30-day average of a price index during the month the fuel is loaded onto Crowley’s vessel, Handeland added — which will likely be August.
Until then, the utility and its customers have to wait, placing them “at the mercy” of global markets, he said.
This story is co-published by Northern Journal and Bethel-based public media outlet KYUK.
