Alaska LNG provides more details on project construction.

• Author: Persily, Larry
• Position: OIL & GAS

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This update, provided by the Kenai Peninsula Borough mayor's office, is part of an ongoing effort to keep the public informed about the Alaska LNG project.

Alaska LNG would have to move tens of thousands of sheets of paper for permits and tens of billions of dollars to construct a North Slope natural gas project. But all that can be moved electronically. It's the actual heavy moving on the ground, in the air, and across the sea that is described in the project's latest filings with federal regulators.

On June 15, the project sponsors filed two of twelve of their second round of draft resource reports with the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, with more planned for July and August. The General Project Description (Report No. 1) provides the most detailed look yet at how Alaska LNG would move construction material and workers into place and how they would build the most expensive energy project in North American history.

Though more specifics will come in later reports, Report No. 1 said:

* The project's preliminary list includes thirty construction camps, fifty-three pipeline storage areas, ten contractor yards, and eight short rail spurs to the Alaska Railroad. The camps would range in size from skid-mounted mobile facilities for up to 120 workers to 1,200-person main camps-with an ever larger camp at Nikiski.

* During construction, the work would affect almost seventy-two thousand acres, but just one-sixth of that area during operations.

* No more than three hundred workers would be housed in local accommodations at any time during the LNG (liquified natural gas) plant and marine terminal construction in Nikiski. A construction camp would be built at the site to accommodate up to five thousand workers at its peak. The LNG facility is the largest single component of the project.

* Seward, a year-round, ice-free port, would be used primarily as a point of entry for pipe deliveries. The Alaska Railroad can deliver out of Seward to Anchorage, Fairbanks, and the pipeline mileage in between. The project would need about 115,000 forty-foot-long pipe sections delivered to the right site at the right time, and much of it would move through Seward.

* The steel pipe would come to Alaska with its protective coating already applied. After unloading, the pipe would be trucked or railed to a double-jointing plant near each port of entry and/or near Fairbanks for welding into eighty-foot sections, which would be moved by rail or truck. Pipe destined for Beluga on the West Side of Cook Inlet and in Nikiski would be delivered by barge.

* Whittier, on Prince William Sound, would be used primarily for containerized cargo, pipe and fuel, with rail and road access out of town.

* "Anchorage would be the predominant point of entry for most of the project's general freight [non-modularized items]. Once received at the port, the materials would be deployed ... via rail, truck, and barge."

In-State Gas Off-Takes

Report No. 1 also identifies three of the five off-takes that would be built into the main pipeline to allow gas withdrawals for in-state consumption: Milepost 441 (measured from Prudhoe Bay) to serve Fairbanks, Milepost 763 to serve Matanuska Valley and Anchorage users, and the end of the line to allow off-take on the Kenai Peninsula. The state is responsible for selecting the off-take points.

"The size and location of the other interconnection points are unknown at this time," the report said. The off-take points would be a valve and T-connection; whatever else is needed to condition and move the gas to customers would be handled by parties other than Alaska LNG.

To build the North Slope gas treatment plant, 62-mile Point Thomson gas line and 804-mile main pipeline, compressor stations along the route, and the LNG plant in Nikiski and marine terminal, Alaska LNG has calculated it would need (preliminary numbers):

* About 340,000 truckloads of equipment, pipe, supplies, gravel, and dirt.

* 15,000 railcar loads of pipe and construction materials.

* Fifty-one barges in four years of sealifts to bring gas treatment plant modules to the North Slope.

* As many as ten barges shuttling between the ports of Anchorage and Seward to bring material to the LNG plant site in Nikiski on a weekly basis for three years. In addition to barge traffic, the project estimates that 20,000 to 25,000 truckloads would be needed to haul materials from Seward and Anchorage to Nikiski.

* About seventy helicopter landing sites.

* Use of four airports: Anchorage, Fairbanks, Kenai, and Deadhorse; and ten landing strips: Beluga, Cantwell, Chandalar Shelf, Coldfoot, Galbraith Lake, www.akbizmag.com

Additional ports such as Homer and industrial docks in the Kenai area "may also be used in a limited capacity" until the project builds its material offloading facility in Nikiski. The project could potentially use Port MacKenzie on Knik Arm as a distribution center for the concrete-coated pipe that would be laid across Cook Inlet, but that would be "dependent upon completion" of the Alaska Railroad spur line to the port, Report No. 1 said.

More Information Was Expected in July, August

The construction logistics information in Resource Report No. 1 does not provide a detailed discussion of how the project would and could affect Alaska's transportation system, such as how the project would manage its truck traffic so as not to overwhelm existing roads. It's a listing, not an impact study. That will come in Report No. 5, Socioeconomics, which Alaska LNG told FERC it planned to submit in July.

That second draft of Report No. 5 will contain some impact and mitigation measures, with the final report, still...