In 1979, Noll started working on the export of Alaska coal to South Korea.

Test shipments of coal from the Usibelli Mine at Healy went to Korea in 1980, but it was five more years before shipments began on a regular basis. Shipments continue today.

It's a toehold in the vast Pacific Rim coal export market, and there are continuing competitive challenges. But at least Alaska is in the market, and that's no small accomplishment. Not many people get the satisfaction of seeing a project worked on for years actually happen.

Noll went to work for Sun Eel, a Korean shipping firm, after working on an unsuccessful project to ship coal to Asia out of Whittier. With Sun Eel, he helped a coal export project from Seward happen and then stayed on with Sun Eel in Seward during the company's initial years of operations. Sun Eel was later purchased by Hyundai Marine, which handles the coal exports today.

Noll served on Seward's city council starting in 1986, and in 1989 was elected mayor of Seward, serving until 1991.

He is originally from New York City, growing up in Greenwich Village during the gritty years of World War II. It was an era when that part of New York was far from the upscale and trendy neighborhood it is today. He was the son of a railroad policeman. "My father was the one who chased the hobos off the trains," he recalls.

After an Army stint in Vietnam, Noll came to Alaska as operations officer for a mechanized infantry brigade at Fort Richardson. He liked Alaska and stayed after leaving the Army, going to work on trans-Alaska oil pipeline construction. He remembers working the graveyard shift as a radio operator in Valdez and at the Prospect pipeline camp, where it was at times 60 below outside.

During those long hours on the graveyard shift he read extensively on finance and economics, and developed an interest in trade, he said.

His interest in Asia and coal resulted from a chance visit to the East-West Center at the University of Hawaii. Noll was there on a month-long vacation following two years of work on the oil pipeline in 1976 and 1977.

"Hawaii was nice, but I was bored after two weeks on the beaches. I wandered down to the port at Honolulu to watching ships being unloaded with goods from all over the Pacific, and when I visited the East-West Center I saw how much attention was focused on U.S.-Asia trade ties," Noll said. His interest in Pacific trade has been growing since.

Noll has been in his new job for about a month now. Formerly one of the department's two deputy commissioners, he took over after the unexpected resignation of former Commissioner Edgar Blatchford in late July.

Noll brings experience to the position, however, having been deputy commissioner since Gov. Frank Murkowski took office in 2002.

Noll has remained mostly in the background in the Murkowski administration, relishing a low profile. But those who know him say he plays an important role as an administration insider, counseling the governor and his senior staff on resource development, a topic dear to Murkowski.

He represented Blatchford on many of the boards and commissions on which the state economic development commissioner is required to sit, such as the Alaska Industrial Development and Export Authority. Now on AIDEA's board on his own, Noll was recently named as vice chairman of the state development authority.

There is about a year left in this governor's term, and Noll expects to bring to fruition several of the agency's initiatives he has helped develop in the last three years.

One that Noll is proud of is an outreach program to minorities interested in forming or expanding small businesses. The effort has been underway for about a year and consists essentially of workshops to acquaint interested parties with federal and state small business assistance and loan programs. The workshops also help steer attendees to places and resources where they can get more help. State and federal specialists, mainly from the Small Business Administration on the federal level, participate in the workshops.

The sessions are held in different communities, and so far workshops have been held in Anchorage, Fairbanks, Juneau, Kenai and the Matanuska-Susitna Borough, Noll said. The initiative started as a response to an inquiry from local chapters of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, and while aimed partly at minority groups, the process is really "color-blind," Noll said. Anyone can attend the meetings.

"It helps a person with a great idea go to the next level, or it helps people already in business sharpen their skills with things like preparing business plans that a bank will want to see," Noll said.

The state commerce department and the SBA help support the University of Alaska's Small Business Development Center.

Questions raised in the meetings are also early-warning indicators for the department that problems are developing for small businesses. For example, questions about bonding are frequently asked. The state administration is now working on ways of helping small firms deal with bonds, which are required in bidding on many types of public contracts.

Noll is also proud of the success so far of the governor's salmon fisheries revitalization program, which is now in its second year. The department is in charge of administrating $50 million in federal grants to aid fishing communities hit hard by declines in salmon markets. The funds also help individual harvesters or processors who want to upgrade their capabilities in making value-added products rather than just selling raw fish.

There has never been anything quite like the salmon assistance program, Noll said. If it is ultimately successful it will because of the way the state structured the program, requiring grant recipients to contribute a share of the project, ranging from 20 percent for small firms to 50 percent for larger firms.

While the jury is still out on the success of the overall salmon revitalization program, Noll said there is encouraging anecdotal evidence from individual projects. For example, several small processors that received grants to buy salmon filleting and pin-bone-removal machines are making new products and earning more profit selling salmon than they would have before.

"We're helping these people move up the food chain," Noll said.

The program is also nurturing development of a new type of small business; harvesters selling their own fresh fish directly to restaurants, and other buyers and small processors making new products for higher-end niche markets.

Again, luck plays a part in the resurgence of salmon, Noll admitted. There is real demand now for wild salmon, and people are willing now to pay a premium for it. Markets in general are showing improvement, with salmon prices up, if only modestly, in most of the state's salmon fisheries after hitting bottom in 2002.

The flood of farmed salmon at first hurt Alaskans in the wild salmon business, but the Chilean and Norwegian salmon farmers have also succeeded in developing a much wider market for salmon, which also opened up markets for Alaskans.

Now a reaction against farmed salmon is developing as consumers become more concerned with chemicals in food fed to the penned salmon as well as pollution from coastal salmon farms, Noll said. That has prompted new demand for wild salmon.

The state can assist this emerging group of small fisheries entrepreneurs, who are also small business people, with help in finding training in business basics like accounting and taxes. Noll's department already administers loan programs for fish harvesters, but as the industry recovers, commercial banks will step back into fisheries loans, he said.

Noll said that a lot of what he did as deputy commissioner, and now commissioner, is simply to advocate for economic development within state government. He believes that when the state Department of Natural Resources works on timber issues, for example, the state's economic development agency should be there to nudge the process along. The same is true with other agencies dealing with the private sector.

There is actually some modest progress being made with timber, he said. Development of wood harvesting in the Matanuska-Susitna Borough has been made possible by the borough's new facilities at Port MacKenzie, and state lands are being made available for wood supply.

In Southeast Alaska the state was able to help sawmills in the region get through a period of shortages of timber supply from the federal Tongass National Forest by making wood from state timber sales available.