Alaska's freight system was built to ship oil out. Now it's about getting packages in.

Alaska's freight network is being pulled in two directions at once: the oil it was built to move is dwindling, while the flood of online-shopping deliveries keeps growing. That's the picture in a statewide freight memo prepared for the Alaska Department of Transportation, part of a long-range plan looking out to 2055.

The oil side of the story is a long slide. Trans-Alaska Pipeline throughput hit an all-time low in 2020 and fell further in 2025, to about 463,000 barrels a day, down from a 1988 peak of roughly 2.1 million. Alyeska's own analysis found that with more investment, the line could technically keep running safely on as little as 200,000 barrels a day. Industry advocates say the decline isn't a foregone conclusion, pointing to new North Slope projects like Pikka and Nuna as reason to think throughput could stabilize or rebound.

As the oil recedes, e-commerce is filling in. Online sales jumped 42 percent nationally in 2020, and that demand runs straight through Alaska, most visibly at Ted Stevens Anchorage International Airport, which ranked as one of the world's busiest cargo airports. E-commerce is "reinforcing Alaska's role, especially at ANC, as a critical global cargo hub," airport planner Ian Moore said.

The shift lands hardest on the businesses and communities on the receiving end. The Port of Alaska handles about half of everything shipped into the state, so retailers, grocers and construction suppliers treat keeping it modern and reliable as the difference between goods arriving on time and delays that drive up costs. Rural communities depend on a limited set of freight corridors to get supplied at all, and thin infrastructure, just 179 truck-parking spaces across 18 private truck stops statewide, can raise costs and slow deliveries. Trucking still carries more than half of all in-state freight by value.