Unalaska, AK – Members of the Resource Development Council toured Unalaska last week to see what role the community can plan in the development of Alaska's natural resources. The group included representatives from oil & gas, fishing, mining, tourism, and forestry industries. R-D-C executive director Jason Brune says the group tours a different community each year and looks at what roles the industries can play there.

"We use the information that we gather on trips like this to find out what commonalities the different industries have," he says. "For example, the fishing industry has permits that the mining industry has to get or the oil and gas industry."

RDC board member Marilyn Crockett is the executive director of the Alaska Oil and Gas Association. She says she sees Unalaska as a potential staging ground for exploration equipment for the Artic, Chukchi and Beaufort Seas, and eventually for the North Aleutian Basin.

"It could be anything from having seismic vessels here waiting for the ice to clear up north to staging of equipment -bringing it up and staging it over a winter season perhaps, waiting for the ice to clear. It could play any number of factors," Crockett says. "It's a whole new frontier area that the industry is beginning to move into and we think that this area could really play an important part in that."

But in order for the local fishing industry and the incoming oil and gas industry to successfully work together, Crockett argues, both industries must first focus on education.

"It's not just a one-way education, it's a two-way education. It's important for us to understand what's important to local residents how commercial fishery operations are conducted in AK's waters and the reverse is true," she says. "It's very important for those commercial fishing interests to understand how oil and gas industry operations are conducted."

Fishing industry representatives also toured the area. Stephanie Madsen of the At-Sea Processors Association says she's impressed by the improvements in local infrastructure, like the new cold storage facilities. She says the pollock industry is making improvements to help the industry as well by trying to reduce Chinook bycatch through new technology.

"We don't know any results yet, but it's kind of a revised flapper to try to take advantage of the behavioral differences between pollock and Chinook. Chinook are much stronger swimmers than pollock so when pollock fall back in the net, the Chinook will stay forward and they tend to go to the surface," Madsen explains. "And so we tried to experiment with that and to use the power of the vessel to try to control the flapper and get it to move back and forth at will."

Chinook bycatch numbers are down 77 percent from last year.

The Resource Development Council is also looking at different energy sources in the region. Brune says they are co-sponsoring a conference in March in Juneau on geothermal energy and smelter potential in the Aleutians.