State of Alaska teams up with natural gas players for in-state delivery
Mon, July 7, 2008
Posted in Alaska News, Top Stories
ENSTAR, the Anchorage natural gas utility, has joined with the state of Alaska and the Alaska Natural Gas Development Authority in an effort to develop a gas line to service in-state energy needs. Governor Palin announced the group today, saying the pipeline fits in comfortably with the North Slope gas line under consideration by the legislature.
Dave Donaldson, APRN - Juneau and Lori Townsend, APRN - Anchorage
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3 Comments to “State of Alaska teams up with natural gas players for in-state delivery”
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The real big question here is wether or not the Laskan Natural Gas is going to be made available to rural Alaska, places like Bethel, Dillingham, King Slamon, and hundreds of other small communities that are suffering at the hand of these exhorbitant fuel and electrical costs?
That’s doubtful, Mr. Corbett.
Running a gas pipeline from Anchorage or Fairbanks to those remote communities would be like building the entire Trans Alaska Pipeline all over again. The costs would be astronomical and those tiny communities could never consume (and pay for) enough gas to pay back the cost of pipeline construction, to say nothing of making it profitable.
The best option would likely be the development of Liquified Natural Gas (LNG) conversion capacity at an ocean port location, and then take the LNG out to the communities by barge.
But even that’s not likely, from an economics standpoint. Because by the time the pipeline is built to southcentral Alaska and by the time gas is flowing, the population in rural Alaska will likely plummet due to continually increasing oil costs. As populations in rural Alaska drop, the economic viability of sending gas out to the frontier falls even further from the realm of the possible.
I think we’re looking at the beginning of a new Alaska, one where there will be modern life alongside the petroleum infrastructure and rural areas will largely revert to a true pre-oil subsistence life. That is unless the State or federal governments simply pay to create different economic conditions. Forever. And I don’t see how either governmental entity could afford to do that.
That won’t be possible although a new pattern of subsistence (more energy self-sufficient) will have to emerge.
Unfortunately, carbon-flow studies, once very popular, are no longer done. It is easier to compare moose to beef when measured in Joules (kiloCalories). Some older studies very clearly show that industrial agriculture (corn and oil based) is so very much less efficient (negative energy or more energy to plant and harvest than energy recovered in food) than traditional horticulture.
For further reference (my bibliography is out of date, unfortunately) check up on Pelto, Snowmobile Revolution and on the energy-flow special issue of Scientific American
WB Kemp, 1971, The flow of energy in a hunting society. Sci Am 224(3):104-116 [cited in Michael Nowak, Economics of Native subsistence activities in a village of southwestern Alaska, Arctic 30(4):225-233]
A recent hardship is the skyrocketing price of metals in the world which affects cemeteries (looting of brass and bronze) and hunting shells and casings.
Of course, if we understood that the “new global order” is very much like the old (pre-industrial) one– that is, instead of village/city by village/city think of the entire state as one “city” with different neighborhoods, (expand our space-time continuum biases)– then we can certainly adapt our Alaska system. We have before.
We need to change the scale at which we view and live in Alaska, I think.