Alaska

Opinion: The pipeline that stole Christmas: Why Alaska can’t afford this costly project

Published

4 months ago

December 4, 2025

Opinion: The pipeline that stole Christmas: Why Alaska can’t afford this costly project

Gov. Mike Dunleavy, left, and Brendan Duval, CEO and founder of Glenfarne Group LLC, talk about construction of an Alaska LNG pipeline during the Alaska Sustainable Energy Conference at the Dena’ina Center in Anchorage on Thursday, June 5, 2025. (Bill Roth / ADN)

Too many residents, business owners and politicians of Southcentral Alaska — we’re talking the state’s population center of Anchorage, the Mat-Su and Kenai Peninsula — are all agog in anticipation that a multibillion-dollar North Slope natural gas pipeline will save them from unaffordable heating and electric bills.

It’s the time of year for holiday dreams — a warm tradition like Hallmark movies, grandma’s cookies and the Budweiser Clydesdales. But the wintry cold truth about this dream is that there will be no pipeline under the tree — just bits of tinsel left over from premature and misleading celebrations.

The megaproject is too costly and too risky in a world that has plenty of easier and cheaper gas to sell. It has uncertain construction costs, with public estimates ranging from roughly $40 to $44 billion; no binding long-term customer contracts to provide collateral for loans; no binding financial commitments from investors; and actually no gas under firm contract to sell. Other than that, it’s a great holiday package, with the lead promoter publicly talking of delivering a construction decision before the holiday season is over.

Yet many still want to believe it’s possible, preferring to perpetuate the warm holiday glow of bountiful gas, plentiful jobs and wishful thinking of billions of dollars flowing into the state treasury.

But while the notion of a pipeline delivering North Slope gas to Southcentral boilers, furnaces and power plants is consuming much of the air in the convention hall of big ideas, Southcentral utilities face the real prospect of running short of gas before the end of the decade, as Cook Inlet production declines.

Which means those utilities would need to import gas — supercooled into a liquid and delivered by tanker from Canada or elsewhere. Which means spending money to build an import facility. Which means charging ratepayers for the investment.

That’s the immediate problem, not waiting for a pipeline to come to the rescue.

Southcentral’s largest electric utility, Chugach Electric Association, is negotiating with Harvest Midstream, an affiliate of Cook Inlet oil and gas producer Hilcorp, which plans to restore operations at the unused gas export terminal in Nikiski and turn it into an import hub. It’s a low-cost, low-risk plan — with federal authorization in hand — to use the existing dock and storage tanks to help keep the state’s population center warm and well-lit.

However, the same project developer that wants to build the North Slope project, a company named Glenfarne, thinks it has a better backup answer before its pipeline arrives. It proposes to spend hundreds of millions of dollars to build a gas import terminal from scratch. Southcentral gas utility ENSTAR is in on the plan.

The Glenfarne/ENSTAR project not only lacks approval from the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, it hasn’t even applied for authorization. Glenfarne has talked of spending tens of millions of dollars just getting to a construction decision. Then more spending, and years, before it could start importing gas.

All of the Southcentral utilities need to get their collective acts together and use the lowest-cost, fastest-to-develop, most certain option to ensure their customers have the gas they need. That is repurposing the existing export plant into an import terminal.

Building an entirely new facility for a small customer base is as wasteful as spending more public money on an unaffordable gas pipeline.

Any bad spending decisions by the utilities could fall on ratepayers to cover, or the state to bail out. Alaska has made a lot of poor decisions about energy over the years. We don’t need one more.

Larry Persily is a longtime Alaska journalist, with breaks for federal, state and municipal public policy work in Alaska and Washington, D.C. He lives in Anchorage and is the publisher of the Wrangell Sentinel weekly newspaper.

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Alaska

Alaska accepts ballots that arrive after Election Day. This case could end that.

Published

4 hours ago

March 24, 2026

Press Room

Alaska accepts ballots that arrive after Election Day. This case could end that.

WASHINGTON — The U.S. Supreme Court appears poised to rule in favor of the Republican National Committee that all ballots must be received on Election Day to be counted.

In a case argued Monday, the RNC challenges a Mississipi law that allows ballots postmarked on or before Election Day to arrive up to five days later.

Alaska accepts postmarked ballots that arrive up to 10 days after Election Day – 15 days if mailed from overseas. And, for Alaska, the implications of the Supreme Court ruling could extend beyond mailed ballots.

The RNC case could be consequential for the midterm elections, when control of Congress is at stake. While people of both parties vote by mail, more permissive rules for it are perceived to help Democrats, especially since President Trump rails against the practice.

U.S. Solicitor General John Sauer argued that counting ballots that arrive late violates the federal law that sets the Tuesday following the first Monday of November as Election Day for the whole country.

“All ballots have to be received and the ballot box has to close on Election Day,” he said.

In Alaska’s last general election, more than 50,000 ballots arrived by mail. The Division of Elections couldn’t immediately say how many of those arrived in the 10 days after Election Day but it appears to be many thousand.

Sometimes, even Alaska ballots cast in person on Election Day aren’t received the same day. The village of Atqasuk , on the North Slope, tried to phone in its 2024 election results but couldn’t get through to the Division of Elections. The mailed ballots arrived nine days later.

Alaska Attorney General Stephen Cox cited the Atqasuk episode in a friend-of-court brief he filed in the Mississippi case.

“Alaska asks this Court to consider how its rule here will apply in all States—including Alaska, where ‘receiving’ a ballot isn’t always as simple as walking to a precinct or driving a few hours to pick up a ballot box,” he wrote.

Pat Redmond, co-president of the Alaska League of Women Voters, said Alaska has a secure process for mailed ballots. She believes the current deadline is fair and allows remote places necessary time to deliver their ballots.

“Not every place has electronic transmission,” said Redmond, who has also served as an election worker. If all ballots have to be in on Election Day “then those people, their ballots don’t count, and that’s disenfranchising people.”

Attorney Scott Stewart, defending Mississippi’s ballot deadline, told the justices that it’s wrong for the Trump administration to suggest that late-arriving ballots are subject to fraud.

“Obviously, they’ve sounded the anti-fraud theme,” Stewart said. “They haven’t cited a single example of fraud from post-Election Day ballot receipts.”

Late-counted ballots have swung several statewide contests in Alaska.

•The 2020 ballot measure creating Alaska’s ranked choice voting system and open primaries was losing on election night but ultimately won.

•Post-Election Day counts gave Sen. Lisa Murkowski the lead over challenger Kelly Tshibaka in 2022, and Murkowski’s lead grew further after second- and third-choice votes were tallied.

•In 2024, a measure to repeal ranked choice voting was ahead on election night but narrowly lost in later counts.

Late-counted ballots typically include an unknown number of ballots that arrived before Election Day, too. Still, despite no evidence of wrongdoing, supporters of the losing campaign have sometimes alleged fraud.

The Supreme Court is expected to issue a ruling in the Mississippi case this summer. An attorney for the Republican National Committee told the justices a June ruling would allow states to change their ballot rules in time for the November election.

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Alaska

Polar bear undergoes root canal at Alaska Zoo

Published

16 hours ago

March 23, 2026

Press Room

Polar bear undergoes root canal at Alaska Zoo

ANCHORAGE, Alaska (InvestigateTV) — Staff at the Alaska Zoo performed a root canal on one of its polar bears after the bear broke a canine tooth.

Kova, 4, shares an enclosure with another polar bear named Cranbeary. The two have toys, treats and a large pool where Kova likes to take her morning swim.

Curator Sam Lavin noticed something was wrong when Kova’s behavior changed.

“Kova is a very interactive and busy bear and she just seemed kind of off. She was pawing at her mouth a little bit,” Lavin said.

Lavin suspected a tooth issue and asked Kova to open her mouth for a closer look.

“We could see that she had broken one of her canines and there’s any number of ways she could have done that,” Lavin said.

An X-ray confirmed the diagnosis. Zoo staff consulted with a veterinary specialist outside Alaska, sent the X-rays and received advice on how to proceed.

“We went with a local doctor to do the work,” Lavin said.

An endodontist who normally operates on humans was part of the large team that performed the root canal on the fully sedated 450-pound bear.

“Everybody knew ahead of time what their role was and what to do and where to be and it was so well planned out and everybody worked so well together,” Lavin said.

The procedure went smoothly.

“She feels so much better,” Lavin said.

The zoo said Kova quickly recovered and is back with her playmate Cranbeary.