Alaska

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

Published

7 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

ICE: Alaska state attorney arrested by immigration officials, held in Tacoma detention center

Published

10 hours ago

July 16, 2026

Press Room

ICE: Alaska state attorney arrested by immigration officials, held in Tacoma detention center

ANCHORAGE, Alaska (KTUU) – U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement arrested Shucheng “Charlie” Yang, 32, a Chinese national and attorney with the Alaska Department of Law, on July 10 in Anchorage, according to an ICE spokesperson.

ICE said Yang violated the terms of his admission and is a “deportable alien.”

He is currently being held at the Northwest ICE Processing Center in Tacoma, Washington, pending immigration proceedings.

Yang pled no contest to a speeding ticket he was cited for on May 22. There are no other charges against him listed in the Alaska court system.

Yang is the most recent person in Alaska to be taken into ICE custody at the Tacoma processing center; a Mexican woman living in Soldotna was deported along with her three children in February.

His arrest also comes days after a Colombian man was shot and killed by a federal immigration officer earlier this week in Maine, fueling a new wave of protests against perceived ICE brutality.

State outlines hiring process

The Alaska Department of Administration responded to general questions about verifying employment eligibility for all full-time hires and said the state requires applicants to self-disclose their employment eligibility during the application process.

“The State of Alaska hires individuals who have the legal right to work in the United States,” Policy Advisor Kate Sheehan said. “This employment eligibility is confirmed through the federally mandated I-9 verification process.”

Yang is listed as Department of Law civil attorney on the State of Alaska employee directory.

Agencies decline to comment on Yang

Both the Alaska Department of Law and the Office of Gov. Mike Dunleavy declined to address Yang’s employment status or arrest.

“As a practice, the Department of Law does not provide comments on personnel issues,” Information Officer Sam Curtis said.

“We do not comment on personnel issues,” Deputy Press Secretary Grant Robinson said.

Alaska’s News Source is reaching out to Yang through multiple channels while he remains detained in Tacoma.

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Alaska

Alaska university gets funding for critical minerals center

Published

22 hours ago

July 15, 2026

Press Room

Alaska university gets funding for critical minerals center

ANCHORAGE, Alaska (KTUU) – The National Science Foundation has selected the University of Alaska Fairbanks to be the site of a new critical minerals research program, making it one of 12 new technology innovation centers across the nation that received federal funding, according to Yereth Rosen with the Alaska Beacon.

The new Critical Minerals Accelerator Engine in Alaska will receive $15 million in funding for two years and up to $160 million over 10 years, the university said on Tuesday.

The organization will be located at and led by UAF’s Geophysical Institute and will work with more than 40 partners, said Steve Masterman, the university faculty member who helped lead the application for the award. Partners include private companies, Native corporations, nonprofits, other universities and other entities, said Masterman, who formerly served as Alaska’s state geologist.

UAF already conducts scientific research into minerals considered critical to the nation’s economy through its Critical Minerals Collaborative. That program is more scientific and academic-focused, said Masterman, who is its deputy director.

In contrast, the Critical Minerals Accelerator Engine will be focused on putting research to use, determining ways to commercialize resources, addressing supply needs, workforce development and other issues important to the critical minerals industry.

Though the scientific research already conducted at UAF will be helpful, the accelerator idea is industry-focused, Masterman said.

“This is quite different because it’s an economic development project,” he said.

Alaska is rich in resources considered critical minerals. The state has 56 of the 60 minerals classified by the U.S. Geological Survey as critical to the nation’s economy, UAF said in its statement.

In addition to the Alaska award, the NSF on Tuesday announced its awards for other innovation engines in different parts of the nation. The sites have different primary purposes, such as disaster prevention and mitigation, robotics development and development of advanced information technologies.

The Alaska innovation engine will be led by Lee Ann Munk, a faculty member at the Geophysical Institute and a geosciences professor at UAF’s College of Natural Science and Mathematics. Munk is currently director of the Critical Minerals Collaborative at UAF.

“Our NSF Engine is built on the simple but ambitious idea that Alaska can lead the nation not only with the abundance of its critical mineral resources, but also in how we innovate, develop and deploy the technologies needed to produce them responsibly,” Munk said in a statement released by the university.

“By bringing together researchers, Alaska Native organizations, industry, workforce partners, state and federal agencies, national laboratories and communities, we are creating an engine that accelerates discovery into action,” she said.

Editor’s note: This story was republished with permission from the Alaska Beacon.

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