CALGARY — Hundreds of kilometres up the Pacific coast from where Canada’s first liquefied natural gas export terminal is set to start up this summer, a monster lays dormant.

Alaska has long had ambitions to ship its natural gas to international markets, but the cost and scale of such an undertaking has held it back for decades.

But there’s been renewed interest in the megaproject since U.S. President Donald Trump issued an executive order on his first day in office devoted to Alaska resource development. State officials, including Gov. Mike Dunleavy, have been busy in recent weeks trying to woo potential Asian buyers of the gas under long-term contracts.

Industry experts have doubts the Alaska behemoth will awaken this time, but they say Canada must be mindful of the threat it could pose to its own nascent LNG industry.

“If there’s a time to build it, now would probably be your best bet,” Enverus senior analyst Josephine Mills said of the Trump administration’s keenness on Alaska gas and the Republicans’ control of Congress.

“But then again, this has been being talked about for the past 30, 40 years. It’s by no means a new project. So definitely I think it would be faced with a lot of hurdles to come.”

With an estimated price tag of US$44 billion, Alaska LNG would see a 1,300-kilometre pipeline traverse the state from north to south, passing through treacherous terrain to deliver an average of 3.5 million mmBTU a day of gas to a liquefaction plant in Nikiski, south of Anchorage. The project also includes a carbon capture plant by the gas fields on Alaska’s North Slope.

Some of the gas would be for Alaskans’ needs, but most would be loaded onto tankers and sold across the Pacific, the same markets Canadian LNG developers want to tap.

“It would be beneficial to Canada to not have Alaska LNG be built,” said Mills.

But if it did go ahead — and that’s a big if — it would be after 2030, she added.

Late last month, the state corporation behind the massive endeavour, Alaska Gasline Development Corp., signed Glenfarne Group as lead developer on the project. Glenfarne, a U.S. builder of energy infrastructure, now owns 75 per cent of the project, AGDC holding the rest.

A final investment decision on Alaska LNG is expected some time this year.

Kent Fellows, an economist with the University of Calgary’s School of Public Policy, said contracts to buy LNG are signed before plants start up and usually span several years.

So the trade chaos Trump has unleashed with a bevy of tariffs against one-time allies does the Alaska project no favours.

“It can be really costly to make some of these investments if you’re not sure that trade relationship is going to be stable going forward,” Fellows said.

“One of the huge advantages that the United States had up until about 12 months ago (is) they had a reputation for being a very stable economy, being an economy that believed in global free trade.”

If Alaska LNG is somehow successful in sewing up contracts with Asian buyers, it makes it harder for B.C. projects further behind in development to secure enough demand to justify their own plants.

“With an LNG market, that competition happens at the time the facility is built, so timing the market can end up really, really important,” said Fellows.

However, the CEO of Canada’s biggest natural gas producer said there should be plenty of interest to go around.

Mike Rose, who heads up Tourmaline Oil Corp., foresees worldwide demand soaring by up to 50 million mmBTU by 2035.

“We won’t be oversupplying because there might be a project that comes on in Alaska,” he said. “We need all of them.”

In a speech to Canadian Club Toronto last week, TC Energy chief executive François Poirier said he’d like to see a “Team Canada” approach to developing LNG.

TC Energy built the pipeline that ships gas across B.C. to the LNG Canada terminal in Kitimat.

“In Alaska, the U.S. administration is today working toward signing (memorandums of understanding) for LNG with countries like Japan and South Korea,” Poirier said.

“The governor of Alaska has travelled himself to Asia to line up customers and investors for Alaskan LNG, and guess what? He returned from his trip with an agreement from Taiwan.”

Poirier said no matter which party wins the April 28 federal election, it will be key for the prime minister, premiers, businesses and Indigenous leaders to show a degree of alignment similar to the U.S..

“Collectively, we’ll have to travel to Asia and market ourselves and underscore that Canada is back in business and is a good risk to take.”

This report by The Canadian Press was first published April 14, 2025.

Lauren Krugel, The Canadian Press

The Trump administration’s mass firings of federal workers and funding restrictions has affected the monitoring of a landslide-prone slope that could create a dangerous tsunami in Alaska’s Prince William Sound.

The Alaska Division of Geological and Geophysical Surveys, in a recent update, alerted the public about the problems affecting the multiagency team monitoring Barry Arm. The site is a fjord where an unstable rocky slope could collapse into the water, potentially creating a tsunami affecting the community of Whittier and a variety of Prince William Sound mariners and visitors.

Administrative changes affecting federal agencies that are part of the Barry Arm monitoring program “have resulted in delays in equipment repairs and service renewals essential to maintaining full operational readiness,” the Division of Geological and Geophysical Surveys update said.

Those delays “may have temporary impacts on tsunami hazard awareness and response efforts in the region,” the update said.

The slope at Barry Arm has been moving gradually, and its movements are recorded through an array of instruments at the site and elsewhere in the sound.

Barry Arm is one of dozens of sites in Prince William Sound where landslide risks have increased as glaciers that buttress mountain slopes retreat. The sound and surrounding parts of Southcentral Alaska are considered vulnerable because of rapid glacial loss.

Because of Barry Arm’s potential for a catastrophic collapse, the site has received special focus from agencies trying to track slope movement. A key goal is to provide early warnings to people in the area, if those become necessary.

Federal agencies involved in the Barry Arm program include the U.S. Geological Survey; the National Weather Service and its National Tsunami Warning Center; the U.S. Coast Guard; and the U.S. Forest Service. Nonfederal partners include the Division of Geological and Geophysical Surveys and the University of Alaska Fairbanks’ Alaska Earthquake Center, and the cities of Whittier and Valdez.

Dennis Staley, of the USGS and Alaska Volcano Observatory, said that changes to federal agency priorities and protocols for travel, purchasing and contracting have affected the Barry Arm Landslide and Tsunami Hazard Monitoring System.

“These have resulted in some rather sizeable changes in the way we approach the logistics to conducting fieldwork in recent months. We also have to plan for and adapt to changes in workforce composition as our staff members are laid off, or offered, contemplate, and sometimes accept offers for early retirement, paid administrative leave, etc.,” he said by email.

Weather conditions have also affected operations, team members said.

USGS scientists went to Barry Arm on April 2 and did maintenance work on radar equipment used to measure landslide movement and transmit that data, Staley said.

National Weather Service crews also got out to the area earlier this month and restored service at a Whittier site that was recording water-level data, said Dave Snider of the service’s Tsunami Warning Center. Crew members were able to restore service there, but more trips will be needed “as time, weather, and funds allow,” he said by email.

No more field work is planned for this month, Staley said. Annual spring maintenance is planned for May, he said.

Originally published by the Alaska Beacon, an independent, nonpartisan news organization that covers Alaska state government.

Alaska residential rental costs used to be the highest in the nation.

Now the typical rent in Alaska is about the same as the national median for the first time on record, and 19 states have higher rental prices, according to an analysis by state economists.

That is a dramatic turnaround from the past.

In the first decades of statehood, rental prices in Alaska were far higher than those in any other state. In 1980, for example, Alaska’s median rent was about 50% above the national level and 18% higher than Hawaii, which then had the second-most expensive rental costs. Even in 2016, Alaska’s median rent was the nation’s sixth-highest, about the same as that in New York and Massachusetts, the analysis found. In a group of numbers, the median refers to the one in the middle, with half higher and half lower.

The analysis is published in Alaska Economic Trends, the monthly magazine of the Department of Labor and Workforce Development’s research section. It uses information from 2023, which is the most recent data available.

The study compares states’ gross rents, as defined by the U.S. Census Bureau, which include utilities.

Alaska’s median gross rent was $1,373 in 2023, the analysis said. California had the highest median rent of $1,992 that year, followed by Hawaii at $1,940 and the District of Columbia at $1,904.

Rental prices have risen over the years in all states, but the increase in Alaska over the past decades has been slower than that elsewhere.

That is not necessarily good news or bad news for Alaskans, and it does not necessarily mean that rents are cheap in Alaska, said Rob Kreiger, a state labor economist and co-author of the Trends article.

“Clearly, rents are moving up at a faster rate in the rest of the country than they are here. But we don’t know whether they are more affordable here than there,” he said. Affordability depends on how much renters are able to spend, he said. “You could have situations where wages are quite low and rent is less affordable,” he said.

Alaska’s rent trends roughly track the ebbs and flows of the state’s economy and demographic changes and the way Alaska conditions have compared to those in the Lower 48 states.

Twelve consecutive years of net outmigration — with more people leaving the state than moving in — was one factor that pushed Alaska’s rent-price ranking lower, the analysis said. So were the job losses related to an oil price slump from 2015 to 2018. The COVID-19 pandemic affected all states’ economies and rental prices, but Alaska had a slower post-pandemic recovery, the researchers note.

The inclusion of utilities as part of gross rents is a factor that may have slowed the increase in Alaska costs. Natural gas provided by utilities is much cheaper than the heating oil that Alaskans relied on in past decades, the report notes.

The findings include information about rental vacancy rates, which are now higher in Alaska than in the nation as a whole. That is a switch in recent years; from 2005 to about 2012, Alaska had a tighter rental market, with vacancy rates that were lower than the national rate, but since then Alaska’s rates have been higher or about the same as the national rate, according to the analysis. That is despite home construction activity that has been consistently lower in recent years than in the past, Kreiger said.

Still, it is difficult to calculate a statewide vacancy rate “because it varies so much from place to place,” he said. Parts of rural Alaska have dire housing shortages, for example.

While the comparison to national rates is new, the department’s research section does regular analysis of rental costs differences within Alaska.

The researchers, in cooperation with the Alaska Housing Finance Corp., publish annual reports on rental costs at different state locations, based on costs each March.

The most recent report found that among 10 regions, median rents in 2024 for two-bedroom apartments were lowest in the Wrangell-Petersburg area, at $1,081 a month, and highest in the Kodiak Island Borough, at $1,713 a month.

Originally published by the Alaska Beacon, an independent, nonpartisan news organization that covers Alaska state government.