This story is co-published by Northern Journal and KYUK.
HOOPER BAY, ALASKA — Every few weeks this winter, 75-year-old Harvey Joe, a Yup’ik Elder in this Western Alaska village, 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 costs $9.24 a gallon, and unleaded gas costs $8.44.
In Chevak, heating fuel was a few bucks cheaper — meaning that each 30-gallon load could save Joe $75.
After dragging his sled home, Joe said he’d have to lie down and rest, especially if the trail was rough.
“Sometimes, I ask somebody to do it for me,” he said. “But if I don’t have a choice, I just go and get it myself.”
Across the country, consumers are contending with sharply higher fuel prices amid a 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.
Hooper Bay still hasn’t received its first barge of the year. That means prices there are set to rise sharply when the first delivery arrives — with residents waiting to find out exactly how much.
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.
Earlier this year, the region’s fuel distributors issued dire warnings that they might not be able to secure adequate fuel for the summer shipping season. While those fears have since diminished, significant price increases still loom.
In recent days, barges have begun 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.
Last week, 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: starting on the road system on Alaska’s 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.
“They were asking me for wood,” he said. “They couldn’t do it at $10. So, there’s going to be more of them at $15.”
Harvesting firewood can help, Hill added, but then “we’re talking about running chainsaws and vehicles to go harvest,” which requires more gas.
“It affects everything,” he said.
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 whale, 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 last week, 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 today’s 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 past Chevak, a village 20 miles away, 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. Bush planes that serve as Hooper Bay’s only link to the regional hub, Bethel, run on fossil fuels too — with one-way tickets priced at $320 for the 150-mile trip.
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.
What doesn’t make sense, he added, is why fuel prices are so high in Hooper Bay when so much oil is produced inside Alaska.
The entirety of the Western Alaska mainland sits less than 1,000 miles from Valdez, the terminus of the trans-Alaska pipeline system. That pipeline moves as much petroleum in 30 minutes as Hooper Bay’s industrial tanks store for an entire fall, winter and spring.
But that 450,000-barrel-a-day supply is unrefined — not in a form that can be used by Western Alaska communities.
Alaska has just three oil refineries, and their limited capacity is geared toward producing unleaded gas, jet fuel and diesel for road system customers — meaning that most of the state’s crude moves by tanker to refineries on the U.S. West Coast.
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.”
Deliveries scrambled
Industry officials earlier this year warned that global oil market turmoil was threatening not just substantial price hikes in Western Alaska, but also whether distributors could even get access to enough supply to meet customer orders.
The supply risk now appears to have diminished.
Vitus’ sales director, Mike Poston, said Monday that “we have the supply.” Another Crowley spokesperson, David DeCamp, said in an email last week that fuel availability is “manageable.”
Crowley is actively working to secure fuel from South Korea and Canada, DeCamp added, with 37 million gallons in “confirmed and pending volumes” representing some two-thirds of customer needs, including winter inventory.
But both Crowley and Vitus acknowledged that the global market volatility is putting pressure on prices. In Vitus’ case, it has also scrambled the company’s delivery schedule.
In a typical year, Vitus would have its fuel tanker in position off the Western Alaska coast by mid-May, said Poston, the sales director. This year, though, its tanker hasn’t arrived yet, and while Poston said it’s coming, he declined to disclose exactly when it’s set to arrive.
“Using the tanker to supply Western Alaska is the most efficient way, but because of product availability, we weren't able to do that,” Poston said in a phone interview. “So, we're starting our system with fuel supply via barge.”
Recent gas price increases to more than $9 from less than $7 at gas stations in two Western Alaska hub towns, Dillingham and Bethel, are representative of the cost structure that the company sees for 2026, Poston added. Given “warning signs” of price bumps as high as $5 a gallon, those increases of less than $3 are “good news,” he said.
“But summer is not over and the war is still going on,” Poston said. “We don't know what the future is going to bring.”
The Vitus tanker’s late arrival, Poston added, means the company will be “under pressure” to meet customer orders before the end of the delivery season — when stormy weather and sea ice force companies to pull out of the region.
Crowley, meanwhile, has started making deliveries from the Glen Cove, a Marshall Islands-flagged tanker that was loaded in Vancouver and is currently parked off the village of Egegik in Bristol Bay.
Company officials would not say exactly how much they expect prices to rise this year. But Vogel, the spokesperson, said Crowley recognizes “the importance of price visibility and continue(s) to communicate with customers as market conditions develop.”
‘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 local 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.
“We'll do some back-of-the-envelope calculations and some worst-case scenarios, just to make sure we have the right number when we pull out our fuel loan,” Handeland said.
High up on the Kuskokwim River in the hamlet of Sleetmute, Henry Hill, who operates the community’s store and fuel station, says gas prices he charges are set to rise to $11.89 a gallon from $9.43 now.
In the Yukon River village of Galena, meanwhile, the price for the city government’s 425,000 gallons of fuel — used to run a municipal electric utility — has risen to $5.61 a gallon from $3.82 last year, said City Manager Shanda Huntington. That supply is barged down from the Tanana River on Alaska’s road system, she said.
“It's going to really hurt our community, because I have to adjust all the electricity rates on that — and that's going to really bump it up,” Huntington said.
In response, the Alaska Legislature, before its annual session adjourned last month, passed an array of policy measures aimed at softening the hit from higher fuel prices.
They include doubling the maximum amount, to $1.5 million, that communities and utilities can borrow under a state-sponsored loan program for bulk fuel purchases.
Schools are getting another $29 million in energy relief, while $11 million is going to a low-income heating assistance program.
Including more than $50 million budgeted for an existing program to offset high rural electricity prices, lawmakers are spending a total of some $100 million on relief, said House Speaker Bryce Edgmon, who represents a rural district centered in Dillingham.
“But it's not going to be close in terms of making people whole over what could be another cold winter,” Edgmon said in a phone interview last week from Juneau. “It scares me to death.”
At a Zoom meeting with constituents earlier that day, Edgmon said he heard anxiety, fear and “real apprehension tied to the unknown” about pending fuel price increases.
“The toll it's going to take on families — there's probably going to be some that aren't going to be able to keep their homes warm,” he said. Nonetheless, he added, rural residents pride themselves on being resilient, and “we’re going to survive.”
In Hooper Bay, which is still awaiting its first fuel barge of the year, that resilience is already on display.
In interviews last week, residents described their frequent trips to Chevak last winter to pick up cheaper fuel. Others took their snowmachines on long journeys in sub-zero temperatures to harvest wood, which residents burn to offset their heating bills.
Those trips will likely become even more common once Hooper Bay gets its first summer fuel delivery, further boosting prices.
Last week, before the barge’s arrival, Jay Bell Sr. pulled up to Crowley’s pump to put $12 of gas into his four-wheeler. That paid for 1.4 gallons, which Bell said is enough to run errands for a couple of days.
“We’re really struggling, even with stove oil,” he said. “If it goes up, we’ll have to budget more and tie up our stomachs, to keep our house and children warm.”
Nathaniel Herz welcomes tips at natherz@gmail.com or 907-793-0312. This article was originally published in Northern Journal, a newsletter from Herz. Subscribe at this link.
