The Kenai Chamber of Commerce and Visitor Center played host to the Alaska Gasline Development Corporation for a discussion on the Alaska LNG project. The joint chamber luncheon had featured speaker Brad Chastain, Alaska LNG project manager, talk to the residents of the Kenai Peninsula.
Chastain said that Alaska LNG will use clean, energy-efficient, and safe production methods to deliver a stable supply of natural gas for in-state distribution as well as for commercialization. North Slope fields are expected to deliver an average of 3.5 billion cubic feet of gas per day. This fully permitted and integrated energy project will release North Slope natural gas, via a large diameter pipeline, and deliver it to markets specifically in Asia, as they are in great need for LNG due to their commitment to move away from using coal.
Chastain talks the benefits to the Alaska LNG project:
“We try not to oversell this because, frankly, Alaskans already know what this is going to do for our state. It’ll certainly change the complexity of Nikiski and the Kenai Peninsula. During construction, it’d be very active and then we’ll be left with 400-450 operational jobs. Think of like the Nutrien plant type of workforce and the generations of folks that can live there and build their families based on a good living associated with working at this facility. Overall, we’re going to have 12,000 direct jobs during construction, about 1,000 (long-term operations) jobs between those two large facilities and the pipeline and then, of course, indirect jobs. Depending on whose study you want to sort of take a look at, you can apply a ten times factor, some as high as 14 times, where all the flow of opportunities that come out of each one of those direct jobs.”
The culmination of this project comes from a recent trade mission to Japan where Governor Mike Dunleavy met with Japanese companies, utilities, and government ministries about procuring Alaska’s natural gas while assessing the state’s potential to export various new sources of fuel. The country is pivoting towards an energy transition that Alaska can supply in the coming decades, which also includes blue and green hydrogen.
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