YELLOWKNIFE - Arctic marine operator, Northern Transportation Company Ltd. (NTCL), is hoping to cash in on Fort McMurray's boom with a Northern shipping route.

NTCL is in talks with Calgary companies to ship goods for the Fort McMurray oil sands across the Pacific Ocean from Asia through the NWT to Alberta.

Ships would offload in the Canadian Beaufort, travel down the Mackenzie River, across Great Slave Lake to the Slave River.

At Fort Smith a tug will be placed on either side of the rapids, and freight will be portaged using heavy-lift machinery.

The route continues on the Peace River to Lake Athabasca, ending in Fort MacKay, 45 kilometres north of Fort McMurray.

To prove the viability of the route to companies involved in the oil sands, NTCL performed a test run between Hay River and Fort McMurray

last July.

"It gives them a great deal of reassurance that it is a viable route and could be done," said Sunny Munroe, NTCL's business liaison and manager for communications.

Companies had expressed skepticism over the route.

"It makes them a little nervous if it's a bad ice year," she said.

The length of the shipping season is only five months, and there is only two months of the year that ships can get around the coast of Alaska. By Aug. 1, the ice has receded enough to allow ships through, Munroe said.

The push for an alternative route is driven primarily by back up in steel fabrication plants in Alberta and North America.

It could take up to two years for an order for buildings to be taken, Munroe said, let alone built.

In addition, there is a shortage of labour in Alberta to construct the buildings.

The proposed alternative is to build the plants in countries such as China, Korea, and Indonesia, and then ship the materials to Fort McMurray via the NWT.

"If they can go offshore... get things made where labour costs are cheaper and where there is available steel fabrication facilities, they can solve a couple of problems," Munroe said.

"You can carry things that are heavier than you are allowed on a road and you can take things that are longer than a rail car can take," Munroe said of the advantages to marine shipping.

The largest challenge NTCL will face is ice and water level in the Mackenzie, Slave, and Athabasca Rivers. They are not deep rivers, and water levels drop as the season progresses, Munroe said.

While NTCL hopes this will become a regular route, work still needs to be done before goods can make their way to Alberta.

"The tugs that we used to use on the river... need to be refurbished.

"They haven't been used since we shipped on that route on a regular basis," Munroe said.

NTCL started shipping on the route in 1934 but stopped service in 1982 when road and rail service came to the North.

The proposed route offers tremendous opportunities for Fort Smith, where ships will be portaged.

NTCL is proposing to build a warehouse in the community and thirty jobs could be created, said Mayor Peter Martselos.

"It's going to give an economic boost to the community, no two ways about it," he said.

Martselos has been told that the route could be used for 10 to 15 years. A meeting will be held in Fort Smith this week about the proposal.