{"id":774047,"date":"2026-09-03T06:30:41","date_gmt":"2026-09-03T13:30:41","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.esri.com\/about\/newsroom\/?post_type=blog&#038;p=774047"},"modified":"2026-09-03T08:33:15","modified_gmt":"2026-09-03T15:33:15","slug":"alaska-carbon-sequestration-opportunity","status":"publish","type":"blog","link":"https:\/\/www.esri.com\/about\/newsroom\/blog\/alaska-carbon-sequestration-opportunity","title":{"rendered":"Alaska Opens Its Geology to the World\u2019s Next Energy Economy"},"author":671,"featured_media":0,"parent":0,"menu_order":0,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"sync_status":"","episode_type":"","audio_file":"","transcript_file":"","podmotor_file_id":"","podmotor_episode_id":"","castos_file_data":"","cover_image":"","cover_image_id":"","duration":"","filesize":"","filesize_raw":"","date_recorded":"","explicit":"","block":"","itunes_episode_number":"","itunes_title":"","itunes_season_number":"","itunes_episode_type":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[],"tags":[],"industry":[],"esri-blog-category":[492922],"esri_blog_department":[478182],"class_list":["post-774047","blog","type-blog","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","esri-blog-category-oil-and-gas","esri_blog_department-natural-resources"],"acf":{"video_source":"","video_start":"","video_stop":"","short_description":"Alaska Department of Natural Resources\u2019 new mapping hub is opening Alaska\u2019s carbon storage potential to the world.","pdf":{"host_remotely":false,"file":"","file_url":""},"flexible_content":[{"acf_fc_layout":"sidebar","layout":"standard","image_reference":null,"image_reference_figure":"","spotlight_image":null,"section_title":"","spotlight_name":"","position":"Right","content":"<p style=\"font-weight: 400;\">The Alaska Department of Natural Resources, with HDR as contractor, has launched a hub that puts the state\u2019s publicly owned geologic data to work for the next energy economy.<\/p>\r\n<p style=\"font-weight: 400;\"><strong>Key Takeaways<\/strong><\/p>\r\n\r\n<ul>\r\n \t<li>Alaska\u2019s geology and open data make it an inviting place to test carbon storage projects.<\/li>\r\n \t<li>Partnerships with Asia could turn shipping routes into two-way energy exchanges.<\/li>\r\n \t<li>Building the hub within the state\u2019s enterprise GIS from day one meant reduced friction and a seamless handoff.<\/li>\r\n<\/ul>","snippet":""},{"acf_fc_layout":"content","content":"<p style=\"font-weight: 400;\">When Alaska\u2019s founders wrote the state constitution in 1956, they embedded a mandate that the state\u2019s natural resources belonged to its people and must be developed for their maximum benefit. Within a decade, oil had been discovered on the North Slope. By 1977, the Trans-Alaska Pipeline System was moving crude oil south to Valdez. For more than four decades, Alaskans have received direct royalty payments from the Alaska Permanent Fund.<\/p>\r\n<p style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Now the state is applying that same mandate to an intriguing resource: empty rock formations that can hold carbon dioxide.<\/p>\r\n<p style=\"font-weight: 400;\">The Alaska Department of Natural Resource (DNR) launched the <a href=\"https:\/\/alaska-ccus-hub-soa-dnr.hub.arcgis.com\">Alaska Carbon Capture, Utilization, and Storage (CCUS) Hub<\/a> in December 2025, with support from a US Department of Energy grant. HDR, a professional services firm specializing in architecture, engineering, and construction services, built the publicly accessible mapping platform on ArcGIS Hub technology. HDR\u2019s deep roots in Alaska\u2019s oil and gas regulatory landscape helped it aggregate the well data, seismic surveys, landownership layers, and permit guidance that the CCUS Hub delivers.<\/p>\r\n<p style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u201cThere may be a really great opportunity to sequester CO<sub>2<\/sub> in the interior of Alaska that we have no idea about yet,\u201d said Heather Beat, petroleum land manager at DNR\u2019s Division of Oil and Gas. \u201cIt really paints this unfinished picture of what\u2019s going on with the subsurface and the geology.\u201d<\/p>\r\n<p style=\"font-weight: 400;\">That unfinished picture is already drawing attention globally. Hilcorp Alaska, the largest natural gas producer in Cook Inlet, signed a\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/www.akbizmag.com\/industry\/environmental\/hilcorp-partners-with-japanese-firms-to-study-carbon-sequestration\/\">joint study agreement<\/a>\u00a0with Sumitomo Corporation and Kawasaki Kisen Kaisha to investigate aggregating CO<sub>2<\/sub> in Japan, transporting it by tanker to Alaska, and storing it underground. The shipping routes that have long carried energy out of Alaska would carry carbon back in.<\/p>"},{"acf_fc_layout":"gallery","gallery_images":[774048,774049,774050,774060,774055]},{"acf_fc_layout":"content","content":"<p style=\"font-weight: 400;\">What makes this kind of assessment possible now is a new public mapping hub. The Alaska Department of Natural Resources (DNR) launched the <a href=\"https:\/\/alaska-ccus-hub-soa-dnr.hub.arcgis.com\/\">Alaska Carbon Capture, Utilization and Storage (CCUS) Hub<\/a> in December 2025, with support from a US Department of Energy grant. HDR, a professional services firm specializing in architecture, engineering, and construction services, built the publicly accessible mapping platform on ArcGIS Hub technology. HDR\u2019s deep roots in Alaska\u2019s oil and gas regulatory landscape helped it aggregate the well data, seismic surveys, landownership layers, and permit guidance that had never lived in one place before.<\/p>\r\n<p style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u201cEverything was spread out on multiple agency and division websites,\u201d said Beat, the hub\u2019s principal investigator. \u201cPeople had to comb through to find what they were looking for.\u201d Consulting firms called DNR just to find out where to start.<\/p>\r\n<p style=\"font-weight: 400;\">HDR built the hub directly inside DNR\u2019s enterprise geographic information system (GIS) environment. The team added custom layers and contextual pop-ups to focus the data on CCUS opportunities, then connected it to ArcGIS Hub for public delivery. When the work was done, there was no handoff as the hub already lived within the state\u2019s own systems. \u201cThe philosophy was to meet data where it was,\u201d said Bridget Brown, HDR\u2019s project manager.<\/p>\r\n\r\n<h3 style=\"font-weight: 400;\"><strong>What the Map Shows<\/strong><\/h3>\r\n<p style=\"font-weight: 400;\">In most oil-producing states, well log data belongs to the producer. In Alaska, it belongs to the people. That public ownership, now organized and searchable in a single interface, makes Alaska a natural proving ground for carbon storage development.<\/p>\r\n<p style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Cook Inlet alone holds an estimated 50 gigatons of carbon dioxide (CO<sub>2<\/sub>) storage capacity. Declining reservoirs there and on the North Slope, some producing since the 1950s, are candidates for CO<sub>2<\/sub>-enhanced oil recovery. Injecting CO<sub>2<\/sub> increases reservoir pressure and extends production from mature wells, while qualifying for the <a href=\"https:\/\/www.congress.gov\/crs-product\/IF11455\">45Q federal tax credit<\/a>, which pays $85 per metric ton of CO<sub>2<\/sub> permanently stored underground. \u201cCO<sub>2<\/sub> would be a good solution for increasing reservoir pressure,\u201d Beat said, \u201cand through time they could transition to pure sequestration.\u201d<\/p>\r\n<p style=\"font-weight: 400;\">The mapped resources are only the beginning.<\/p>"},{"acf_fc_layout":"gallery","gallery_images":[774056,774058,774061]},{"acf_fc_layout":"content","content":"<h3 style=\"font-weight: 400;\"><strong>A Permitting Guide, Not Just a Map<\/strong><\/h3>\r\n<p style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Non-GIS specialists can build their own maps directly in the browser, assembling the spatial data layers most relevant to a storage permit application. \u201cWe guide them to the datasets that are needed,\u201d Brown said.<\/p>\r\n<p style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Landownership in Alaska is genuinely complex: Surface and subsurface rights on the same parcel can belong to different entities, with Alaska Native organization, state, and federal holdings interwoven across the map. The hub makes the complexity navigable, identifying who holds what and directing users toward the right conversations.<\/p>"},{"acf_fc_layout":"gallery","gallery_images":[774054,774057,774059]},{"acf_fc_layout":"content","content":"<p style=\"font-weight: 400;\">In workshops with DNR, Brown was struck by what staff knew about individual wells, such as details about why specific formations were promising, and observations accumulated over careers. \u201cAs they were seeing their ideas come to fruition, they showed us places on the map,\u201d she said. That expertise is now accessible to anyone with a browser.<\/p>\r\n<p style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u201cWe want to be good stewards of our land,\u201d Beat said. \u201cWe want to develop our resources. That\u2019s written into our constitution, and so we want to provide transparency of our data and put it in a format that\u2019s easy for users to access.\u201d The well logs, the seismic surveys, the geologic records belong to Alaskans.<\/p>\r\n<p style=\"font-weight: 400;\">The hub opens Alaska to the next energy opportunity for the generations that follow.<\/p>\r\n&nbsp;\r\n<p style=\"font-weight: 400;\">See how <a href=\"https:\/\/www.esri.com\/en-us\/industries\/earth-sciences\/disciplines\/sustainable-energy\">GIS is powering the next generation of clean energy planning and carbon storage<\/a>.<\/p>"}],"references":null},"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO Premium plugin v25.9 (Yoast SEO v25.9) - https:\/\/yoast.com\/wordpress\/plugins\/seo\/ -->\n<title>Alaska Opens Its Geology to the World\u2019s Next Energy Economy<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"Alaska Department of Natural Resources\u2019 new mapping hub is opening Alaska\u2019s carbon 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