Investors looking to ship bulk water out of Sitka are asking for another extension. At a Gary Paxton Industrial Park board meeting last week (7-16-26), leadership from Arctic Blue Waters Alaska Inc. said climate change and geopolitics have made the prospect of selling Sitka’s water more possible than ever before. But they still need more money to develop a plan to collect and ship it.
In 2021, the City and Borough of Sitka agreed to sell Arctic Blue the right to purchase water from Blue Lake. Under the agreement, the international bulk water shipping company had a few years to engineer and build a pipeline to collect water from the lake on its own dime. As they neared their deadline last year, Arctic Blue approached the Gary Paxton Industrial Park Board, and were granted an extension to September 30th of this year to submit their plans.
With the new deadline approaching, Arctic Blue is again asking for another year to deliver the project design, and wants to extend its deadline to ship the water to October 2028.
Arctic Blue’s business development director Tomasz Tarasiewicz said shipping bulk water has become less of a pipe dream. He said both climate change and the wartime targeting of desalination plants in the Middle East [link] have decreased water security around the world, making the prospect of shipping bulk water more viable.
“12, 24 months ago, nobody was thinking that due to Middle East intervention, Iran is going to shoot desalination plants in Qatar, Bahrain, the Emirates, Saudi Arabia,” Tarasiewicz said. “All of these countries who have already an issue of water supply just realize that a $2 or $3 billion desalination plant is a very easy target to destroy, and they end up having no water.”
While Tarasiewicz said it was more possible than in years past, there are still hang ups that have forced them to ask for the extension. The company’s COO and co-founder Fred Paley said they’re still trying to secure $1.5 million for the final engineering report. And then there’s the cost of fuel- which has skyrocketed.
“It’s an extra half a million dollars in order to move a load of water. Hopefully, within a year, that’s come back to normal, but it’s it’s hard to say what’s happening in the Middle East,” Paley said.
And shipping water is a relatively new model. Tarasiewicz says that means securing initial funding is a challenge
“So nobody’s really willing to come to come and pay $1.5 million to say, ‘Oh yeah, let’s do an engineering study because it makes sense.’ No, everybody’s waiting to see if this is doable, if this is feasible, if this is bankable,” he said. “So we have an uphill battle here. The only big change in the last 12 months is geopolitics have been showing that countries that have a water supply have to think differently in how they secure their water supply.”
Several park board members, including Chad Goeden, were open to extending the agreement with Arctic Blue for another year, but felt it was reasonable for the company to pay a fee to keep their place in line.
“If there is going to be as much demand as Thomasz says there is, and I hope you’re right, then I would think you would have investors lining up to give you money to be involved in this project, which would very easily cover this, in the grand scheme of things, fairly small amount to maintain that option,” Goeden said. “So I understand what you’re saying that you think this is going to be huge, and I hope you’re right. But to me, that would mean you’d have investors tripping over each other to be involved.”
The board agreed to recommend an extension for a $25,000 fee. It passed 3-1 with Scott Wagner opposed.
