Natural Gas Pipeline from Alaska to Anchorage or Canada?

Alaska has experienced the growth of ideas for distributing public energy resources about the state and a few on sending gas to the Canadian pipeline system with a connection from the North Slope. Seven billion dollars was the price mentioned recently to construct a pipeline from the North slope via Fairbanks to Anchorage for a 24" natural gas line. A pipeline through Canada might cost 30 or 40 billion, and the environment more, yet it would let additional Canadian fields tie in and supply gas to the 48 states when or if the U.S. is thoroughly dependent on it.

Whenever I write on these topics its a good idea to make a sort of disclaimer on the general manner in which politicians and business develop energy resources in Alaska. Because there is so much and pervasive habitat loss, and extermination of species biodiversity along with the decline of health of the ecosphere as a result of the traditional way of advancing cultural economy and energy production I support a different way-one that does not exist and probably won't. I prefer that human culture use its best ideas to adapt to the new empirical facts of life rather than inertially continue the way it always has. Yet it is those terms that one must work to comment on real economic inertia of the era.

A vast global mining corporation is hammering away to develop copper claims in the headwaters rivers drainage to Alaska's and America's Bristol Bay and home of the nation's healthiest salmon habitat. Other miners force through upstream Canadian mines on rivers flowing into S.E. Alaskan waters. Mines tend to affect water drainage and leach toxic levels of metals creating future Superfund clean up sites lasting for generations or thousands of years. Yet if no life on Earth remains because of catastrophic ecospheric damage from other human activities it won't make a difference.

On Wasilla's KGB (Knik-Goose Bay) Road (this may be the street where the former KGB headquarters could be found leading some to say that you can see Russia from Wasilla) that leads to the Knik settlement developments continue with coal strip mining operations not too distant planned. Oil wells and roads all over the state allow increased access to destroy wildlife and ecosphere health fragmenting ecosystem and depleting fisheries health. The Yukon and Kuskokwim river's salmon crashes, and those of the Susitna River create the impression of another Washington State in progress with the military bases and toxic waste besides.

Most U.S. Presidential candidates don't know where the United States is located. In the early years of the U.S.A. presidents invested in the U.S.A. and built it up with activism. They also stayed out of protracted foreign wars. They sought to enrich the United States. They did not deregulate investment banking and corporations such that the nation's wealth would be relocated abroad like the Red Army relocating factory equipment from Germany to Russia in 1946. Today's U.S. Presidents don't know where America is at even if they land Air Force One here occasionally. The rich will get globally richer and the middle class and poor, poorer.

Alaska Governor Parnell has a plan to build a hydro-electric dam on the undammed Susitna River that drains the Alaska Range. I am unenthusiastic about that growing up in the Pacific Northwest along the Columbia River.

Washington State once had a Governor-Dan 'Strait Arrow' Evans, named as the medal of honor naval destroyer squadron commander who effectively attacked a Japanese battle cruiser in the Pacific in an epic naval engagement. Capt. Evan's body was never recovered, yet the spirit of national defense and of keeping the integrity of the states and its land and sea ecosystems health remains a goal of many Americans-except possibly in some states where globalists and anti-conservationists find it better to pimp natural resources for the most profit today.

Governor Evan's environmental policy was of the day-uniformed. Hydro-electric plants were built, and nuclear power plants constructed in excess of later need. Today we should know better and take a far more nuanced approach to building design, insulation and disciplined conservation and increase of natural resources with the eye to the future set upon low cost, high temperature superconductors.

There are alternate ways to deliver natural gas to Fairbanks and Anchorage for 7 billion. Building a rail line from Fairbanks to the North Slope for 7 billion dollars probably isn't one of them.

One might build a gas liquification plant on the North Slope as ecologically as possible and connect in some way to the Alaska Railroad at Fairbanks and send pressurized gas rail cars to Anchorage.

It would also be possible to build two or three large gas carrying icebreakers to deliver gas most of the year to Anchorage via water...ships don't cost seven billion dollars.

Obviously ice thickness experts would know how much of the year it would be practical to ship gas via Bering Strait to Anchorage. There are other issues involved such as noise from the ships introduced to the environment out of context and season. Some day quiet electric hydrodynamic engine ships that are quiet should replace the prop and diesel driven vessels.

It might be good to use Alaska's geothermal power and some private businesses are looking into that. The state might also create a geothermal resources department to support and stimulate use of that resource in an environmentally smallest practical impact way to produce electricity. Alaska is a state with a lot of geothermal potential.