I’ve been trying to keep up with all of the debate going on concerning the approaching natural gas supply cliff my hometown of Anchorage is within sight of. The quickest solution seems to be importing liquified natural gas to complement the declining tapped reservoirs under Cook Inlet that we’re currently relying on. The pie-in-the-sky solution is building a pipeline bringing some of the North Slope’s abundant gas supply down to local tidewater. Of course, getting an adequate supply of renewable electricity online in time is the best bet, but there isn’t time.
So if we look at the two solutions involving natural gas and combine them, then we might, if the right kind of ship exists, import our own natural gas. In his opinion column on March 13, Larry Persily stated that just that kind of oceangoing vessel does exist. They are nearing completion, and so it can be riding the waves in time to provide North Slope liquefied natural gas to Nikiski before we go over the cliff. They are icebreaker liquefied natural gas tankers and are designed to handle the icy conditions they’d encounter for eight or so months each year.
I don’t know what one of the ship’s capacities is compared to Anchorage’s needs, or how long it takes to make a round trip between the North Slope and Cook Inlet, but if Persily’s $300 million price tag is correct, we could buy three of them for less than a billion dollars.
There is a problem with the Jones Act and using foreign-made ships for commerce directly between a pair of U.S. ports. But with three of the ships, there may be time to stop in Korea to offload a bit of the cargo en route to Nikiski.
— Mark Lovegreen
Anchorage
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