No pipeline fieldwork in Canada this summer: businesses skeptical about progress of gas line.

• Author: Liles, Patricia
• Position: OIL & GAS

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Driving the Alaska Highway this summer provided a sharp, visual contrast in activity levels between the Alaska side of the border, where up to 60 field workers were busy with a multitude of study projects relating to the proposed natural gas pipeline and the Canadian side, where there was no visible evidence of an approaching major industrial construction project.

In eastern Interior Alaska, field crews based out of Tok were working on the Denali Alaska Gas Pipeline project, a $40 million work plan in 2008 to advance the BP Alaska and ConocoPhillips project. Vehicles, mostly full-size trucks with the Denali logo emblazoned on the side, were parked in a variety of places along the highway in July as crews took advantage of the long summer days to complete preliminary work such as surveying potential stream and river crossings, conducting cultural resource identification studies, completing archaeological surveys, starting hydrology, soil and air monitoring studies and completing aerial photography and mapping.

CANADA SEES NO ACTIVITY

But across the border in western Canada, no Denali trucks were visible during the surge of field activity in July. Calgary-based TransCanada, which won legislative approval in early August for its proposal under the Alaska Gasline Inducement Act, also was not visible along the Alaska Highway throughout Canada.

Personnel in businesses operating along the Alaska Highway have not heard or seen any recent activity related to the proposed pipeline project that would transport vast quantities of North Slope natural gas in northern Alaska to existing pipeline infrastructure in Alberta and beyond.

"We're hearing about the potential, some noise from the Tok area," said Caulene Beatty, owner and operator of the 1202 Motor Inn at Beaver Creek, twenty miles into Canada from the Alaska/Yukon border. "They're talking like it's busy there, but we're seeing nothing, business-wise."

Craig Dotson, an Anchorage-based ConocoPhillips employee and project manager for the Denali 2008 development program, confirmed that field crews working for the BP-Conoco-Phillips consortium were staying in Alaska this summer. "In Canada, they've been briefed a little bit and we have targeted meetings later on," he said. "There's no field work that we're doing across the border this year. Next year, we will have a lot."

CANADIANS DON'T SEE A BOOM COMING

A team of 15 to 20 people, similar in organization to the Alaska group, has...