Alaska Gov. Mike Dunleavy said Thursday on “Varney & Co” that the state’s $44 billion liquefied natural gas (LNG) project is drawing investment interest from Asia.
At the center of the Alaska LNG project is an 800-plus mile pipeline for moving natural gas that would run from the North Slope to Nikiski, a town in southcentral Alaska.
The Alaska Gasline Development Corporation (AGDC) has pegged the average amount of gas that the pipeline could carry each day at 3.5 billion cubic feet. It said on its website that “much” of that would be shipped to “international markets” such as ones in the North Pacific.
“We just were in Asia for a couple of weeks. We went to Taiwan, Thailand, Korea and Japan, and they are interested in the gas pipeline,” Dunleavy told host Stuart Varney.
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“In Taiwan, for example, they signed an LOI, a letter of intent, which will lead to a permanent contract of six million tons of gas,” the governor said. “This would be the largest off-take of any one off-taker, I think, in the history of LNG. They also talked about actual investment in the pipeline itself.”
Dunleavy posted about the LOI that Taiwan’s state-owned CPC Corporation had inked for the Alaska LNG project, on his Facebook page in late March.
Dunleavy told Varney on Thursday there were also “serious discussions” in Thailand, South Korea and Japan “about how they could invest in the gas pipeline as well as the off-takes.”
The project has been in the works for quite some time.
“This project has all of its permits. Every single one of them has its right of ways, has beaten back all the court cases to date,” Dunleavy said. “We’re looking at actually putting the pipeline itself in place, the liquefaction plant later that would actually send the gas later, but putting that pipeline in place so that Alaska itself can get gas, our goal is two and a half years for this 42-inch pipe to be put in place, since we’ve got all the permits.”
“We’ll be making some final decision investments, at least Glenfarne will, which is the outfit that is the private investor and lead in this project, probably by August, September at the very latest.”
Glenfarne became the majority owner and lead developer of the Alaska LNG project in March after inking a deal with the AGDC, according to a press release.
The project would be a boon for Alaska, according to the state’s governor. More than 740,000 people lived in Alaska as of 2024.
“It would be 60 years, I think, of prosperity,” he told Varney. “You know, very importantly, it would provide fuel for our bases. Alaska has a number of military bases. We are on the frontier with some pretty dangerous neighbors. Our gas fields in Cook Inlet have been depleting for years, and so this would mean that our bases would definitely have fuel. Our utilities would have fuel.”
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He also said the state could be “looking at things such as manufacturing and data farms well in the future.”
Oil and gas are a major part of Alaska’s economy. Other large industries in the state include tourism, fishing, timber and mining, among others.
