Welcome

Alaska is back in the liquefied natural gas export business. The first LNG tanker has called at the ConocoPhillips LNG plant at Nikiski, near Kenai, since late 2012. This follows the company’s reactivation of the plant this spring, company spokeswoman said Friday. The plant has been in a suspended status since late 2012. The tanker is the Excel, owned and operated by the Belgium-based Exmar shipping group, and it landed Friday morning, May 2. ConocoPhillips could not say how long…

Read More Read More

The education bill compromise (HB 278) and the capital budget (SB 119) are last items of business today. A revamped version of Knik Arm crossing legislation (HB 23) was adopted Friday morning. Knik Arm and educatin were the big stumbling blocks for adjournment, amnd the disagreement over the form of the Knik Arm bridge bill developed just this week. We spelled out major provisions of the SB 278 compromise in our report yesterday, Bulletin No. 9. The compromise on HB…

Read More Read More

The state Legislature’s 2014 session is headed toward its required April 20 adjournment. As of today, the Senate has passed the operating budget back to the House. Next stop is the conference committee. The Senate Finance Committee has also released its first draft of a capital budget with appropriations to finish the partly-built University of Alaska Anchorage engineering building, to fund more work on the billion-dollar Knik Arm bridge, and to add funds, but not complete, the partly-built engineering building…

Read More Read More

Buccaneer Energy has formed a project team to plan development of a natural gas discovery at the Cosmopolitan offshore Cook Inlet prospect, company CEO Curtis Burton said in a teleconference with investors Sept. 10. “Cosmo has turned out to be substantially nicer than we had ever hoped for,” when the asset was acquired from Pioneer Natural Resources, Burton said. The plan is to work toward development of a gas discovery in the upper reservoir sections of the field and to…

Read More Read More

When legislators open their 2013 session in Juneau, the knotty oil tax problem awaits them. Despite the new Republican-led leadership in the Senate, the Legislature will proceed cautiously in considering proposals to reduce the state’s oil production tax. The issue is highly complex and controversial, and the new Republican Senate leaders, while sympathetic to the need for changing the tax, will realize they must move carefully.

There’s more gloomy information on the Southcentral Alaska gas supply situation. Enstar Natural Gas Co. is about the begin 2013 with about 4.2 billion cubic feet of its gas requirement for the year unmet, meaning not under contract. Enstar’s total annual gas need is about 33 billion cubic feet, so this is a significant amount and the largest supply deficit the utility has ever had at the start of a year. Enstar’s gap grows to about 50 percent of its…

Read More Read More

A group of Japanese companies interested in a large Alaska liquefied natural gas project are getting a cool reception from the administration of Gov. Sean Parnell. The group has been talking with the administration on and off since summer, and would like to develop a large LNG plant either in Valdez or Cook Inlet they would own, with the pipeline owned by other parties. However, they have been asking for some form of Memorandum of Understanding with the state, similar…

Read More Read More

It has been two and a half months since the Legislature adjourned its special session on oil taxes. Lawmakers have long since returned home to ponder the failure of the session, and to busy themselves, in most cases, on re-election campaigns. There was a lot of work done on oil taxes in the 2012 session and despite the failure, in the end there was some progress on this divisive and controversial topic. Here’s the problem: As is well known, oil…

Read More Read More

The state Department of Transportation and Public Facilities has released its summary of a reconnaissance study of possible road and rail routes to the Ambler Mining District of the western Brooks Range. The least expensive option, and the quickest to build, appears to be a road from the Dalton Highway to the Ambler district. Other routes for roads, and several options for railroads in the study, were longer and more expensive. There are three significant known mineral deposits in the…

Read More Read More

Alaska oil and gas operators are cautiously optimistic about prospects in 2012 on several fronts. Here’s an outline of where things stand for the industry in the new year: • The state Legislature will resume work on a revamp of the state’s oil and gas production tax when it goes into its annual session Jan. 17, and although the measure remains highly controversial there are some signs that key obstacles may be overcome. • Shell is very close to securing…

Read More Read More