Boats, Cars Top Sitka's Carbon Emission List

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Category: News

Created on Thursday, 12 December 2024 15:36

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By GARLAND KENNEDY
Sentinel Staff Writer
    A draft inventory of greenhouse gas emissions in Sitka, made public last week, shows most of the emissions last year came from various forms of transportation.
    Overall in 2023, the report found that Sitka emitted 60,459 megatons of carbon, with a large majority of that related to transportation, both by land, air and sea. One megaton equals one thousand tons, and in a town of 8,500, the per capita figure comes to about 7.1 megatons emitted in a year.

Sitka's ANB Harbor is pictured in 2023. (Sentinel File Photo)

    The Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, a Department of Energy Office of Science research organization based in Richland, Washington, compiled the report for the City of Sitka as part of the DOE’s Energy Transitions Initiative Partnership Project, ETIPP. Public comment on the draft inventory is open until December 22.
    Sitka’s commercial fishing fleet was the largest single source of emissions, 31 percent of the total, the report said. The next largest source was land vehicles, 27 percent. Recreational boating accounted for 2 percent.
    By category, fourth-fifths of the town’s emissions are transport-related, while 11 percent is from buildings and 8 percent from waste disposal. Sitka’s power grid is independent from infrastructure on the mainland, and is powered by dams on Sawmill Creek and the Vodopad River, a fact that cuts the town’s carbon signature by eliminating the emissions from conventional gas or coal-fired power plants that are commonly a large part of a community’s carbon emissions.
    Andrea Mott, an engineer with PNNL who worked on the report, said Sitka’s hydro-powered grid and heavy use of marine travel put the town in an unusual position.
    “I’ve done these inventories for not-islands, and so it’s been more interesting on the unique things with Sitka being hydro power. Things like electricity for buildings is not a factor that we have to look at. And then the impact of boats and how that’s like a large chunk of the pie is for fishing, boating, recreation and seaplanes, too,” Mott said from her Washington office.
    The inventory occurred as part of the Sitka Community Renewable Energy Strategy, or SCRES.
    Compared to Port Angeles, Washington, a town of about 20,000 on the Olympic Peninsula, Mott said Sitka has a higher per capita rate of emissions than the 6.6 megatons annually there.
    She and her team have conducted other carbon inventories for other municipalities and U.S. Department of Defense.
    As Sitka is an island town, travel occurs by plane or boat, and the inventory breaks down forms of travel by more specific categories.
    “The way we did air travel, it’s in two buckets,” Mott said. “ One is the commercial air travel that is not refueled in Sitka, so that is its own bucket. But then seaplanes, small planes, helicopters, use… fuel that is imported.”
    Small aircraft and helicopters amount to 11 percent of Sitka’s carbon total, while commercial air travel contributes 9 percent.
    The draft report found that Sitka receives and ships about 235,000 tons of cargo by barge annually, with a footprint of 3,700 MT of CO2, or about 1 gallon of diesel per ton per 650 miles traveled, making barge travel more carbon efficient than trains or trucks, the document states.
    The impact of air and barge travel was lower than expected for Molly Grear, another PNNL engineer involved with the inventory.
    “I thought it was going to be barging stuff, and that was not as much as I thought it was. The air travel is not as much as I thought it would be. I thought that people in Sitka would have flown more than people in other places,” she said.
    Sitka’s carbon emissions are a little lower than Juneau’s per capita rate, she noted.
    The inventory doesn’t include a tally of carbon sequestered by trees of the Tongass National Forest.
    “We did not include sequestration either from carbon or from trees… I don’t think there’s a good established methodology, and I think it expanded the scope a bit too much,” Mott said.
    Agricultural land use also wasn’t factored into the inventory.
    Emissions from cruise ships, Mott noted, aren’t included in the inventory but are listed separately in the report. If included, the document states, cruise emissions would raise Sitka’s carbon count by 41 percent by adding 23,000 MT of CO2 while idling in port, and another 460 MT from bus and shuttle travel from the cruise terminal to town and back.
    The draft inventory provides a baseline for the town’s emissions and will allow Sitkans to discuss the future in granular terms, city sustainability coordinator Bri Gabel said.
    “The next step is saying, OK, based on these buckets, what are the things we can and cannot do based on what we want to put our time and resources into emission cutting...  The best way to do it is kind of like what Andrea was saying, to cut your emissions, is electrifying, because in Sitka that is hydro,” Gabel said.
    The purpose of SCRES, she noted, is to work on what happens next, though there is no simple fix on that front.
    “Based on what we know, what are the things that we care about the most, as far as putting our time and effort into actually reducing that number,” she said. “... There’s no smoking gun that’s going to make Sitka significantly more carbon free because we did this. It’s more of just how do we divide what we’re currently using and, again, how do we best start to tackle what we want to do as a community.”
    Katie Riley, chair of the city’s Sustainability Commission, told the newspaper she hopes to see Sitkans provide feedback on the draft inventory so that the final version can be as dialed in as possible.
    “We absolutely need to look at that and give feedback…, so that that document is as accurate as possible, and really reflects the makeup of our community,” Riley said. “We’re super lucky to have the expertise of the scientists that we’re working with on this project, but Sitkans know the nuances of our community best, and what kind of heating they’re using, what kind of transportation they use, what the makeup of our fleet looks like, whether it be commercial fishermen or charter boats or recreational vessels. These documents in nature are based on assumptions, and we need Sitkans now to help make sure that those assumptions are as accurate as possible.”
    One surprise for Riley was the researchers’ finding that only 16 percent of homes in Sitka use heating oil, while 82 percent use electricity and 2 percent burn wood. PNNL researchers had worked backwards from utility bills to determine whether a structure was heated by electricity. However, the inventory also found that 75 percent of commercial buildings in town burn fuel oil for heat, with only a quarter using electricity.
    Not every assumption made in the report is accurate, Riley noted, as the document also calculates the carbon emissions of the charter fishing fleet assuming those vessels burn diesel fuel, when, in fact, those boats tend to be powered by gasoline outboard engines.
    The effects of climate change are already noticeable in the daily lives of Sitkans, she said, adding importance to decarbonization efforts.
    “This is impacting our salmon populations, and this is going to increasingly impact our way of life and the things that we value here in Sitka and across Southeast Alaska and the entire state and world. And so I think we have a really exciting opportunity to do our own part of what we can as a community to address the climate crisis and become a more resilient community – but it takes everyone getting involved.”
    Comments can be submitted by email to sustainability@cityofsitka.org, and those with questions regarding submissions can call 907-747-1856. Comments are due by Sunday, December 22.
    “I would just encourage everyone to explore how they can make a difference in their community, and check out the Sustainability Commission and see if there’s anything of interest on there, whether you are interested in food security or composting or reducing solid waste or reducing our carbon emissions,” Riley said. “There’s a lot of opportunities for Sitkans to get involved.”