At the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission’s meeting in Houston Wednesday night, Marc Van Dongen, Director of the port on Point MacKenzie, stated he would like to see the Alaska LNG Project use the east route.
We asked Kenai Peninsula Borough Special Oil and Gas Assistant Larry Persily his opinion of that suggestion.
Persily: “Hey they’d rather have the money, the pipeline, the building, the construction jobs in their neighborhood and I can understand that but the Alaska LNG Project spent a lot of time looking at routes and there’s a lot of problems with running the pipeline there.”
In an August report, Persily deemed the west route the preferred path for pipeline:
“For example, the teams explained, entering the water near Point MacKenzie would require burying the pipe in shallow water as much as 2 miles out to reach 20 feet of water, more than 3 miles to reach water 35-feet deep and more than 5 miles to get out to 40 feet of water. Distances to deep water with the preferred West Route are half as far.
The shorter the pipeline run to deep water, the sooner a pipe-laying barge can start its work, saving money and environmental impact to the shore and seabed.”
As for the director’s claims that building a liquefaction plant at Point MacKenzie for the state’s gas interests would save the project billions of dollars…
Persily: “I’m not sure you’d save anything, instead of one big plant you’d have one pretty big plant and a small plant, but probably that’s not as cost effective as building one big plant.”
FERC representatives are continuing public hearings throughout the state and will review the various communities’ environmental concerns over the next year.