North Slope Borough, Alaska · 70.32°N · 148.70°W

Polar LNG: a gas export terminal on continuous permafrost

Independent demo by beaded.cloud, not affiliated with Polar LNG. Pre-FID: planned, not built. Sources below.

Planned capacity
~7 MTPA
nearshore gravity-based LNG export
Capital / timeline
$8 to 9B
first LNG targeted 2029 to 2030
Permafrost coverage
90%+
continuous zone, per the permafrost API
Ice-free season
~90 days
first open water ~ mid-July

Is our terminal site on permafrost?

Yes

The whole site is continuous permafrost, over 90% near-surface coverage from West Dock to Point Thomson. There is no thaw-free ground to pick, only how ice-rich it is and how much heat each structure adds. Drag the divider to see it.

Drag to compare
Permafrost zone
  • ContinuousNSPF > 90%
  • DiscontinuousNSPF 50 to 90%
  • SporadicNSPF 10 to 50%
  • IsolatedNSPF < 10%
NSPF, Near-Surface PermaFrost probability.

Terrain (left) vs near-surface permafrost (right), from the beaded.cloud permafrost API (Pastick 2015 + Obu 2019). No terminal location is drawn; Polar LNG has not published one.

Terminal & pad foundations
Material risk
Continuous permafrost, ~600 m thick (Lachenbruch 1982). Strong while frozen, but it thaw-settles badly if warmed. The GBS, gravel pads, and any heated equipment add a thermal load that has to be engineered against.
Feed pipeline corridor
Watch
The feed line crosses ice-rich terrain. Frost heave and thaw settlement are the classic pipeline-on-permafrost failure modes, the reason the Trans-Alaska Pipeline runs elevated on cooled piles.
Coast & nearshore
Material risk
Beaufort permafrost bluffs are eroding fast as sea ice retreats. A nearshore GBS and the West Dock causeway face thaw-driven erosion, ice scour, and storm surge that are accelerating, not stable.

Will year-round shipping work through the ice?

Year-round export runs from the Beaufort, around Point Barrow, through the Bering Strait to Asia, about 3,600 miles versus 10,000-plus from the US Gulf. But the Beaufort is open water only ~90 days a year, so most cargoes sail through ice and live or die on the ice forecast.

Beaufort to Asia via the Bering Strait

Where is the ice right now?

VIIRS true color · 2026-10-11 · NASA GIBS (near real time)

Near-real-time VIIRS true color from NASA GIBS, updated daily (dark in polar winter). Analyzed ice edge: US National Ice Center and NSIDC.

Live marine wind and temperature

ECMWF surface wind along the Beaufort approach, via Windy.com.

When does the winter-work and ice-road season open?

Heavy haul needs the ground at 30 cm frozen to -5 C, which on the North Slope means roughly December to May 5. Beadedcloud's thaw-front model forecasts the conservative open and close dates from on-site sensors, so hauls and pad work are scheduled against data, not the calendar.

Ice-road season · opens December, closes ~May 510 C0 C-10 C-20 C-5 C at 30 cm depthAugSepOctNovDecJanFebMarAprMayJunJulILLUSTRATIVE

Illustrative only, not a live forecast. Representative North Slope ground temperatures; a Polar LNG forecast would run on on-site sensors via the Beadedcloud thaw-front model.

What else should we watch?

West Dock causeway erosion and ice scour
Thermokarst and ground subsidence under pads
Summer sealift barge window
Beaufort subsistence-whaling permitting window
Gravity-based-structure foundation scour
Coastal storm surge as sea ice retreats

Built for Polar LNG.

Site-specific Arctic risk pages, permafrost-API access, ice-route forecasting, and sensor-driven thaw monitoring. This page is a sample of a Polar LNG engagement.

Talk to Beadedcloud

Sources: Polar LNG and the trade press for project facts; Lachenbruch et al. 1982, Pastick et al. 2015, and Obu et al. 2019 for permafrost; the U.S. National Ice Center, NSIDC, and NASA GIBS for sea ice; Beadedcloud for the thaw-front forecasting capability.

  • Polar LNG · Polar LNG (Polar Train LNG LLC), official site
  • PR Newswire · Polar LNG launches and appoints Joel Riddle as President & CEO (Mar 30, 2026)
  • OGJ · Oil & Gas Journal: Newly formed Polar LNG aims to develop nearshore LNG project on Alaska's North Slope
  • LNGPrime · LNGPrime: Polar LNG plans new LNG export project in Alaska
  • gCaptain · gCaptain: How sanctioned Russian Arctic LNG hardware could find a second life in Alaska's Polar LNG project
  • ADN · Anchorage Daily News: Texas investor with Trump-family ties pursues North Slope gas project
  • Lachenbruch 1982 · Lachenbruch et al. 1982: Permafrost, heat flow, and the geothermal regime at Prudhoe Bay, Alaska (JGR 87, B11). ~600 m permafrost thickness.
  • Pastick 2015 · Pastick et al. 2015: Distribution of near-surface permafrost in Alaska (Remote Sensing of Environment 168). 30 m statewide map underlying the permafrost API.
  • Obu 2019 · Obu et al. 2019: Northern Hemisphere permafrost map (1 km), mean annual ground temperature and zonation (Earth-Science Reviews 193).
  • Gibbs 2021 · Gibbs et al. / USGS: Coastal erosion of the Beaufort Sea, accelerating bluff retreat in ice-rich permafrost.
  • ARC 2024 · NOAA Arctic Report Card 2024: Permafrost and sea-ice chapters.
  • USNIC · U.S. National Ice Center: Arctic sea-ice edge and analysis products.
  • NSIDC · NSIDC: Arctic sea ice extent and MASIE regional products (Beaufort, Chukchi).
  • Beaufort ice-free · Inner Beaufort shelf is ice-free roughly mid-July to mid-October (~90 days); the open-water season has lengthened ~36 days in the southern Beaufort since the late 1990s.
  • NASA GIBS · NASA GIBS / Worldview: near-real-time VIIRS true-color satellite imagery (NOAA-20).
  • Point Thomson · ExxonMobil Point Thomson: North Slope gas-condensate field east of Prudhoe Bay.
  • Windy · Windy.com: live ECMWF wind and temperature forecast embed.
  • Beadedcloud · Beadedcloud: ground-temperature and thaw-front forecasting (Santos model), the basis of the illustrative ice-road window chart.