Anchorage Assembly to take up $4.7 million grant to plan Port of Alaska fuel terminal replacement

Corrosion and damage have been found in the piles, fenders and pile caps of a fuel terminal at the Don Young Port of Alaska, according to a memo from the mayor's office to the Anchorage Assembly. Municipal materials say the terminal was damaged in the 2018 earthquake.

The consequences showed up in March, when the port commission recorded fuel delivery rates cut by about a third until repairs were finished.

The terminal handles about half the port's fuel capacity, and the port is where nearly all of Alaska's fuel arrives. It supplies virtually all the fuel burned at Joint Base Elmendorf-Richardson and about three-quarters of the fuel at Ted Stevens Anchorage International Airport. Port materials put its share of refined petroleum reaching Southcentral and the Railbelt above 90 percent. Losing a meaningful share of that capacity would reach aviation, military readiness and fuel distribution statewide, the memo says.

The Assembly takes up a resolution Sept. 1 appropriating a $4.7 million reimbursable grant from the federal Maritime Administration. It pays for field investigations, permitting, preliminary engineering and design — the work of figuring out what a replacement terminal looks like. It does not pay to build one. The remaining $3.5 million of the $8.2 million planning effort comes from a 2023 state legislative grant and from revenue bonds the Assembly approved in April 2025. Design work is scheduled to finish by the end of 2029.

The terminal is a separate problem from the port's larger one. A $180 million federal settlement announced in July over the failed Port Intermodal Expansion Project is directed toward a rebuild the state estimates at $2.7 billion. Mayor Suzanne LaFrance said in April that federal money for the modernization program leaves the facility more secure and more affordable for the state.