By admin 
Flames from burning gas stream into air on Aug. 23, 2018 at a facility within the Greater Prudhoe Bay Unit on Alaska’s North Slope. Prudhoe Bay and other fields hold vast amounts of natural gas that is routinely produced with the oil, then reinjected into the reservoirs because there is no ecomically viable way to send those known reserves to major markets. (Photo by Yereth Rosen/Alaska Beacon)
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The president of the United States urged lawmakers to do everything they can to make the long-desired Alaska natural gas pipeline a reality.
“It is in the national interest to bring Alaskan gas reserves to market at the lowest possible price for consumers,” the president said in an official message. “Every effort must be made to ensure timely completion of the pipeline at the lowest possible cost consistent with Federal regulatory policies.”
The president was Jimmy Carter. The year was 1979. The Alaska natural gas pipeline project was already several years old, with official presidential approval issued two years earlier. The 4,748-mile pipeline project, which Carter touted as “the largest privately financed energy project ever undertaken,” was to be completed by 1984 at a cost of $10 billion to $15 billion, according to the approved plans.
That project never happened, nor did any of the other iterations of an Alaska natural gas pipeline plan that followed.
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Now, five decades later, Gov. Mike Dunleavy is describing an alternate version of the yet-unbuilt pipeline as an imminent megaproject.
“For decades and decades and decades, this gasline project has been a dream of many Alaskans. And we’re closer today than we ever have been,” he said in comments posted on Facebook on May 29.
As Carter did, Dunleavy uses superlatives to describe the plan. “That project will be the largest on the face of the earth, probably the largest in terms of investment ever,” he said in opening remarks on May 19 at the Alaska Sustainable Energy Conference in Anchorage.
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