The fight to keep Red Dog alive past 2031

The state wants to lease Teck Alaska about nine acres of ground along the Red Dog haul road.

In many ways it's a routine notice — a communications tower, a solar array, propane and water storage on an old material site. But the small footprint sits under one of the most consequential operations in Alaska.

Red Dog is one of the world's top zinc producers — not for its footprint, which is modest, but for the richness of its ore, some of the highest-grade zinc anywhere. From a site 80 miles north of Kotzebue, it supplies something like 5 percent of the world's zinc. Since 1982 it has run under a partnership that is still held up internationally as a model: Canadian operator Teck mines land owned by NANA Regional Corporation, owned in turn by roughly 15,000 Iñupiat shareholders.

The mine employs about 600 people, roughly 60 percent of them NANA shareholders, and it provides an estimated 80 to 90 percent of the Northwest Arctic Borough's revenue — the money behind schools and government services across a region whose residents are largely NANA shareholders.

And the reach runs far beyond the borough. Under the resource sharing provision written into the Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act, called 7(i), a regional corporation must share 70 percent of the net revenue it earns from resource development with the other 11 regional corporations, which pass half of that to their village corporations through Section 7(j).

For more than a decade, Red Dog has been the engine of that system — accounting for roughly 70 percent of all 7(i) revenue — and about two-thirds of Alaska's village corporations rely on those payments.

That is what makes 2031 loom so large. The Aqqaluk pit that feeds the mill today is expected to run dry around then. Without a new source of ore, Red Dog closes — and the regional economy built on it contracts sharply.

The next chapter lies about nine miles north, on state land. There Teck is exploring Aktigiruq, one of the largest undeveloped zinc deposits on Earth, rich enough to feed the Red Dog mill for another 25 to 50 years, along with the neighboring Anarraaq deposit.

Federal regulators approved permits in late 2024 for a roughly 12-mile road to reach the prospects, and Teck has begun building it. Infrastructure like the modest lease now up for comment — power, communications, storage — is how a mining district quietly wires itself for a future that isn't guaranteed yet.

There is a hard edge to that future for NANA. Because the new deposits sit on state land rather than NANA land, the corporation and the borough would collect less direct revenue from mining them than they do today. Borough officials have been planning for leaner years, and Teck recently renewed its payment agreement with the borough through the early 2030s. The alternative — no extension at all — is the one everyone in the region is working to avoid.

In its preliminary decision, the state trimmed the required cleanup bond from $32,700 to $10,000, citing Teck's compliance record and the equipment it already keeps on site to remove the facilities and restore the ground.

The site lies within the Western Arctic Caribou Herd's summer range, in a district where the downstream village of Kivalina has long watched the mine's effects on water and subsistence closely.

Public comment on the lease is open through July 27.