This story was originally published by the Alaska Beacon.
It’s not a typo. The price of a gallon of gasoline in the northwest Alaska village of Shungnak was $26.82 on Friday, local residents and regional officials said, likely giving the community the dubious honor of having the most expensive gasoline in the United States.
“It is very much real,” said Glenda Douglas, who manages the store in Shungnak and posted a picture of the price on Facebook.
Across the United States, the average price of a gallon of regular unleaded gasoline was $4.10 on Thursday.
Shungnak is about 280 river miles east of Kotzebue, up the Kobuk River, or 150 miles as the airplane flies. Air travel is the only reliable, year-round form of transportation.
In summer, the river is usually navigable by boat. In winter, residents travel by snowmachine. Last fall and for parts of this summer, water levels on the Kobuk were low enough to interrupt barge traffic, which contributed to the high price of gasoline.
“We sell groceries, diesel and gas,” Douglas said via Facebook message. “We had to get gas flown in twice this summer since (the) barge isn’t able to make it this way because the river water levels (are) too low. Just yesterday, the price was 13.99, but now it is 26.82.”
Shareholders in NANA Regional Corp. are eligible for a discount — they can buy gas for $21.46 per gallon.
Albie Dallemolle is NANA’s vice president of economic development and sustainability.
“Confirmed, Shungnak gasoline price is $26.82 per gallon, which had to be flown into the community,” she said by text message. “This price does reflect the highest cost for gasoline in the region … for now. Unfortunately, prices for gasoline and diesel are expected to increase once communities receive their fall barge deliveries.”
That’s because the current price is based in part on an average of the air-delivered fuel and cheaper barge-delivered fuel. New barge-delivered fuel, bought after the Iran War began, is expected to be more expensive than fuel bought before the war.
Shungnak frequently endures some of the highest fuel prices in Alaska.
In 2007, a gallon of regular unleaded was already $8.11 per gallon, so costly that the Wall Street Journal used the village as an example of what rural Alaska was experiencing that year. By 2022, the price was $14.03 per gallon, according to figures from the Northwest Arctic Borough.
In a message, Douglas said one thing that particularly concerns her is the fact that hunting season has arrived in the region.
Many people in the region practice a subsistence lifestyle, hunting and fishing for food they use to survive.
“(That price) is really going to hurt our hunters that pay for gas to hunt,” she said.
James Brooks is a longtime Alaska reporter, having previously worked at the Anchorage Daily News, Juneau Empire, Kodiak Mirror and Fairbanks Daily News-Miner. A graduate of Virginia Tech, he is married to Caitlyn Ellis, owns a house in Juneau and has a small sled dog named Barley.
