Happy Wife was in Fairbanks — aka Sqaurebanks — most of the weekend. Visiting her brother (Mike), his wife, their two adorable girls, and the sled dogs. They must have a dozen or more. Most of them are hand-me-downs from professional teams that race in the Iditarod, dogs who are either too old to race or for other reasons no longer fit enough. Mike mushes them in winter. He seems to enjoy that a lot. Clears his head, especially I suppose after a maddening week as the City Engineer of Fairbanks. I only joke about it being Squares-ville. In truth there’s a lot of nice folks living there, but I’ve no idea how they cope during the long winters. While it can get very warm in Fairbanks in the brief summer, 90+ is not unknown, it also gets brutally cold during the long winter.
According to Wikipedia:
Average winter low temperatures range from −15 to −25 °F (−26 to −32 °C), but extremes can range from −60 to −75 °F (−51 to −59 °C)
Isn’t it crazy weird then that Fairbanks, Alaska’s second largest city and home to the state’s largest university and several military bases, has no natural gas service. Anywhere. Coal, heating oil, and propane. That’s it. This, in a state that has the two largest oil fields ever discovered and developed in North America, both with ginormous gas caps. Problem is, the 700+ mile trans-Alaskan pipeline was engineered to deliver oil, not gas. Plus there’s no feeder stub to Fairbanks anyway.
There’s been a lot of talk up here about building a pipeline to ship gas from the north slope, problem is the only credible bid was to ship it to Canada, where they’d use some of it domestically, and send the rest to America (lower 48). Others are clamoring for an interstate pipeline, including a feeder stub to Fairbanks, but so far the economics aren’t there. Turns out the world is awash in natural gas, so there’s no point in China, for instance, importing natural gas from Alaska when they have closer, cheaper alternatives.
Plus, for a lot of people up here the very notion of sending the gas to/thru Canada is going over like a fart in church:
