The fuel ship arrived last night, bringing with it a year’s worth of gasoline, and heating fuel for Arctic Bay. It is still anchored out in the bay, so I can only assume that the transfer of fuel has yet to finish. The transfer is done with a boom, a large hose that is floated ashore and hooked up to the tanks at the tank farm.
For the past two seasons additional tanks have been built and storage in others increased. For the two years prior to the upgrade we ran out of fuel here. The first year it happened Nanisivik was still in operation and fuel was trucked over from there. The following year however fuel had to be flown in, at great cost.
Our fuel is relatively cheap compared to the rest of the country. Partly from subsidies and partly from the advantage of buying a year’s worth of fuel for the entire territory. Our gasoline is about $1.02 a litre, cheaper than many or most places (or perhaps all places – I really have no idea) in the south of Canada. (We just received an increase of about $.10/litre on Sept 1st).
There are no private gas companies up here. Fuel is provided by the Territorial Government. Here in Arctic Bay the local co-op has the contract for running the tank farm, but ultimately we buy our gas from the Government of Nunavut.
There are no alternate sources of heating here, everything is oil fired. The furnaces are either forced air or boilers. Electricity is too costly to use as heating up here, and besides it is generated locally with diesel generators. Hopefully alternate energy sources will soon arrive, wind generators and the like. Wind holds much promise here, but climate is very hard on the wind turbines and there are many miles to go before we "green" our environment. It is long overdue.
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Interesting. Now if you could only figure out a way to burn snow… 🙂
I think your gasoline prices equate to about US$3.38 per gallon. It did reach that high at one station here just after Katrina, but is now back down a little, to $2.69. If hurricane Rita doesn’t weaken, it’ll probably be back up again.
$1.02 p/litre!! WooHoo! What are you going to do with all the extra moolah?!
We’re paying $1.29 p/l.
And who runs your electricity?
Wind turbines, carelessly placed, are very hazardous to migrating birds. It took 4 years of environmental assessing here to find a proper place for four experimental turbines. At least they did the assessing…
The extra moolah? I don’t know, buy $5.00 tomatoes I guess.
The electricity is run by the Nunavut Power Corporation, which is an arm of the Government of Nunavut. They’ve recently come under fire for some rate increases that are needed because of debts for some very wasteful practices.
Wind has it’s problem, but we’ve got to stop our reliance on burning oil up here, global warming is hitting us here, more than almost anywhere else.
Got to go spend some moolah…
Just had to pop back in to say our gas locally is now back up to $2.99 a gallon. Maybe I should start looking for a place to store a year’s worth…