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Chapter I, Northwest Arctic Fossil Fuel and Geothermal Energy Sources for Local Use in Alaska The northern part of the Northwest Arctic Energy Region is bounded by the western Brooks Range. This compressional mountain belt includes the DeLong Mountains, which are a complexly folded and faulted series of Paleozoic and Mesozoic sedimentary rocks. The Baird Mountains upland lies further south and is composed of rock types similar to those of the northern Brooks Range, although they’ve been subjected to more intense pressure and temperature, resulting in metamorphism. These two upland areas are separated by the glacially sculpted Noatak lowland. The central part of the region lies south of the Brooks Range and is dominated by the Kobuk Selawik Lowlands, an expanse of low relief that is broken by modest topography in the Waring Mountains and Selawik Hills. The Kobuk River occupies the northern part of this lowland and drains westward into Kotzebue Sound. The landscape throughout this part of the region partly reflects the underlying geology, specifically the development of Cenozoic-age extensional sedimentary basins bounded by local uplifts (sheet 2). This series of basins may be a continuation of the distant offshore Hope Basin that generally thins eastward toward the Kotzebue Basin and eventually the smaller onshore Selawik trough, Kobuk Basin, and perhaps even the Noatak Valley. The southwest part of the region encompasses a portion of the Seward Peninsula that includes a southern onshore segment of the Kotzebue Basin. The Seward Peninsula also includes a number of Cretaceous- and Cenozoic-age plutonic and volcanic rocks, but is otherwise composed of metamorphic rocks similar to those of the southern Brooks Range. Beneath the eastern part of the Cenozoic-age sedimentary basins lies an older series of Jurassic and Cretaceous sedimentary, volcanic, and plutonic rocks. This complex belt of deformed rocks, termed the Koyukuk terrane, records the collision of an ancient volcanic chain that led to the formation of the ancestral Brooks Range. GEOLOGIC ENERGY RESOURCE POTENTIAL IN THE NORTHWEST ARCTIC ENERGY REGION Mineable coal resource potential As explained in the discussion of requirements for mineable coal (see Chapter A), several factors must be considered when evaluating whether a coal deposit is exploitable. The most important factors include the maturity of the coal (rank), seam thickness, amount of impurities (ash and sulfur content), amount of overburden, and the degree of structural complications (steeply dipping seam, folds, faults, etc.). The higher the coal rank, the higher its energy content by weight. Coal rank also influences the minimum seam thickness worth exploiting. Low ash and sulfur contents are highly desirable, as ash represents the amount of non- combustible material in a seam and sulfur combines on combustion to form environmentally damaging compounds. The Northwest Arctic Energy Region has a long history of using coal as an energy source, ranging from very local use by Inupiaq Eskimos to more substantial extraction efforts in support of gold mining, steamship, and related activities in the region. Significant development of this resource diminished in the early part of the twentieth century and commercial extraction efforts appear to have largely ceased by the 1930s. The following discussion summarizes information on coal occurrences in the Northwest Arctic Energy Region and briefly evaluates whether or not these resources might be reasonably exploited as a local energy source. The region’s coal resources can generally be considered in two parts, based on their stratigraphic age (Cretaceous or Cenozoic). Cretaceous Coal Occurrences. Cretaceous-age sedimentary rocks of the Koyukuk–Kobuk basin are present in the east-central part of the region, although they have not been studied in detail and are not well understood. Regionally, this package of rocks may be up to 8,000 meters thick, although reconnaissance geologic mapping in the Waring Mountains indicates that only a small part of these sediments were deposited in nonmarine environments conducive to coal development (Patton and Miller, 1968). No subsurface drilling data are available for these rocks and surface outcrops are generally described as poor and limited to local stream cuts. Nevertheless, a number of thin coal seams have been reported, particularly in the Waring Mountains and along the Kobuk River and its tributaries (fig. I2). Several of the more notable occurrences are described in the following paragraphs. The Kallarichuk River area (fig. I2) has several isolated exposures of moderate to steeply dipping Late-Cretaceous- age coal-bearing rocks (Dames and Moore, 1980; Clough and others, 1982b; Goff and others, 1986). Several of these sites were actively mined as far back as the 1880s and the Haralan Mine probably yielded more than 150 tons of coal up through the early 1930s (Reed, 1931; Plangraphics, 1983). The Kobuk River “mine” was mined during the early days of the Squirrel River gold rush, and about 100 tons of coal may have been mined (Reed, 1931; Plangraphics, 1983). Subsequent attempts to revisit these mines and other exposures have met with limited success due to mine cave- ins, high river levels and generally poor exposure quality. However, the consensus is that a few of the coal beds are 1–2 feet thick, and most are considerably thinner. Coal quality analyses available are limited and indicate the coals are high- volatile bituminous, although the ash content is relatively high (Clough and others 1995). Farther east on the Kobuk drainage a number of occurrences of coal have been reported over the years from the Hunt, Ambler, and Kogoluktuk rivers (fig. I3; see summaries in Dames and Moore, 1980; Goff and others, 1986). Based on their geologic position, they are most likely bituminous and related to coal-bearing strata found elsewhere along the Kobuk River. To date, all of these appear to be float, indicating that although coal is present in the vicinity, its thickness and quality remain unknown. Northwest Arctic Page 84PDF Image | FOSSIL FUEL AND GEOTHERMAL ENERGY SOURCES FOR LOCAL USE
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