Given such dramatic traffic increases, one could consider simply
building a brand-new airport in one or both countries, but it is not
merely tarmac and hangars that are required, but a local economy to
employ, house, and feed the many thousands of people required to staff
this operation. To enable airport construction, the adjacent seaport
would need to be expanded to bring in all the construction materials,
fuel, sulfur, and other supplies. There is no large economic engine such
as Anchorage or Stockholm in this region on which to piggyback, and
there is no reasonable geographic alternative to Patagonia. One could
perhaps reconceive these southern bases as isolated military
installations, but that wouldn’t much change the infrastructure
build-out required. Neither Chile nor Argentina would have any incentive
to commence such a project until some external funding source stood
ready to foot the bill. Nonetheless, given the low ebb at which these
projects would start, it may be that the ground infrastructure build-out
at the tip of Patagonia would define the critical path for global
readiness to arrest the emergence of tipping points at the poles.
A review of public information about newly finished or ongoing airport
construction projects around the world provides context regarding the
granular cost and span information received from ANC and ARN. A list of
substantially all new large commercial airports opened in the last 30
years for which publicly reported cost data is available suggests an
average initial development cost of 5.8 billion in 2023 dollars.
However, as this includes both very large and mid-sized airports, it is
a very crude metric. Dividing these costs by the number of aircraft
movements in a recent year yields a cost-per-100,000-movements of $2.9
billion. Alternatively, simply dividing development cost by the number
of runways (another crude metric of airport capacity) yields a cost per
runway of $2.6 billion. As we envision airports with 2 runways, this
would suggest a cost of $5.2 billion for new SAI airports. This array
of figures confirms that ANC’s estimate of $3 billion for a brand new
airport is on the low end of a very reasonable range. We will therefore
assume that a new airport of the size envisioned here might cost $3 –
5 billion. They also confirm that ANC’s estimate $2.3 billion to double
the capacity of an airport currently handling roughly 100,000 aircraft
movements per year is also reasonable, leading to a planning figure for
such an expansion of $2 – 3 billion.