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 · 2026-07-15 · 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.

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