Natural Gas Dilemma

Taken from: http://oilsandstruth.org/2030-proposed-pipelines , this map suggests just about when the Alaska's North Slope gas pipeline can be expected to be built (2030), and for whom the gas is already earmarked. This map suggests why there is not now, and will not be, any rush on the part of industry to build a North Slope natural gas pipeline sooner than the determined target date, and why the pipeline will run, once it is built, where industry wants it to run. By 2030, the Canadian arctic gas field will be in depletion, but the strip mining of Northern Alberta for its tar sands will have just started. (Natural gas is a necessary, if not particularly efficient, energy source for the extraction of a petroleum-like substance from bituminous sand.)

If all goes according to plan, only after the Canadian arctic gas is going or gone, will it be time to suck Alaska's gas dry as quickly as possible.

Some might suggest that a 54-inch mega-pipeline built according to the long term schedule of a particularly dirty and inefficient Canadian energy industry--an industry with no ties or obligations to Alaska's people or land--wouldn't be in Alaska's best interest. (Perhaps we can be thankful that the Yukon Flats or the Kuskokwim Valley isn't underlain by huge bituminous sand deposits.)

What would be in Alaska's interest? Despite the reluctance on the part of the current governor to look toward a more domestic use of Alaska's gas, there is real merit in the suggestion that Alaska might use some of its own invested wealth to build a small-diameter natural gas pipeline down the Dalton Highway right-of-way to Fairbanks and thence down the railbelt to Anchorage and the Kenai--in one swoop answering a big part of the energy needs for three-quarters of the State's population. (We can envision a future in which vehicles in the railbelt might see conversion to natural gas, and in which various means for the supply of natural gas might reach out to larger bush communities.)

Natural gas is a non-renewable resource, but as a fossil fuel, it burns as cleanly as any fossil fuel can, and can be made to burn very efficiently. As a transition fuel to a different energy future, natural gas is ideal. It would give Alaska time to develop other, renewable energy sources. Properly priced, it would allow Alaskans to make a smooth transition to the sort of "times ten" efficiency that will be required in a post-carbon future. A domestic source of natural gas would forestall the urgent move toward some of the crazier "renewable" energy schemes, like converting 4 million acres of boreal forest in the vicinity of Fairbanks to solid fuel electrical generation, as has been suggested by the current mayor of the Fairbanks North Star Borough. (Was this only a trial balloon? Who can say?) Assuring a reliable and steady supply of natural gas available to companies investing in "green" alternatives for which energy to power manufacturing processes is of concern (e.g. photovoltaic panels) would both provide high-quality jobs to Alaskans and project Alaska toward the cutting edge of the new energy economy--without putting the State on the inevitable "boom and bust" exploitation-and-depletion curve. (A reliable energy supply in a friendly investment environment would also attract green businesses of the kind not yet invented, but which will come with inevitable innovation.)

Here is the dilemma, though, found in the history of the Cook Inlet gas field close to Anchorage. What would have been a century-long supply of natural gas to Anchorage--a city built in large part from its ready access to inexpensive gas energy--has been nearly exhausted in twenty years of massive exploitation by the Agram Fertilizer manufacturing facility. The heady mix of a few ardently defended high-paying jobs, lots of gas, and immense profits to be made from selling high-demand chemical fertilizers on the world market made for a quick depletion of one of Alaska's key resource pools.

Under the current zeitgeist of "anything goes" capitalism (in which there seems to be no such thing as a bad profit, or any such thing as an unwise externality), it is hard to see how inefficient or dirty industries such as those which manufacture plastic feedstock and make fertilizer would not be given carte blanche to take and use up as much North Slope natural gas as possible, as quickly as possible. It is hard to see how the State of Alaska in its current political incarnation would go out of its way to say "no" to a wasteful and polluting 19th-century industrial model while at the same time saying "yes" to transition-to-green-energy 21st century industries.

Instead of cleverly figuring out how to let a relatively inexpensive, steady and reliable transitional energy supply allow Alaska to join in the effort to grow the green economy of the future, today's Alaska would inevitably instead take the easy and familiar path of the known and deplete the resource in decades (and do so in the worst possible way), instead of efficiently husbanding it for centuries.

For some of us, Alaska's land and water has been trashed quite enough, with little or no reason or gain. (For example not one of our "managed" fisheries can honestly be said not to fall on a depletion curve.) As bad as it will be, for the long term health of our northern land, and the people who will remain up here, come what may, perhaps allowing Canadian or other non-Alaskan energy companies to strip and ship our North Slope natural gas outside as quickly as possible is the best way: At least it won't be going to further foul the nest here, where we hope our distant descendants will still live, unto the seventy-times-seventh generation.

Copyright © DHales.