Port Mac gas projects: big plans for commodities dock.
Author | Bradner, Mike |
Position | SPECIAL SECTION: Oil & Gas |
Alaskans have been watching near-term deadlines and schedules with large natural gas projects like the big Alaska LNG Project led by North Slope producers. If built, that project could be exporting 17 million to 20 million tons a year of Alaska liquefied natural gas, or LNG, to Asia.
But there's another LNG project in the wings, smaller and arguably more bite-sized and nimble than the giant project. This is a 1.5 million-ton-per-year project, also aimed at export markets, planned to be built adjacent to Port MacKenzie, on upper Cook Inlet, by Resources Energy, Inc., a Japanese company.
There's one more too, a smaller LNG project being discussed for Port MacKenzie. That's a plant planned to produce LNG for internal Alaska markets like Fairbanks by WesPac Midstream, a California-based firm.
Resources Energy, Inc., or REI, hopes to build its gas liquefaction plant on a private land parcel adjacent to Port MacKenzie, the Matanuska-Susitna Borough's bulk commodities port on Knik Arm. If WesPac's plant is built it would be nearby, on a land parcel leased from the port.
REI's plant would be about the same size as the existing ConocoPhillips LNG export plant a few miles across the Inlet at Nikiski, near the city of Kenai on the Kenai Peninsula.
Big Plans
While REI's initial objective is to purchase Cook Inlet gas to make LNG, the company hopes that a North Slope gas pipeline will someday be built so REI can expand its plant with access to new gas resources. WesPac also hopes to buy Cook Inlet gas for its facility and has signed a preliminary agreement with BlueCrest Energy, a Texas-based independent with plans to develop an offshore Cook Inlet gas discovery at Cosmopolitan, near Anchor Point.
WesPac is a company with experience in development and operation of regional fuel terminals, and the company has moved more recently into projects to supply LNG as a transportation fuel. The company has signed a contract, for example, with Totem Ocean Trailer Express, or TOTE, to supply LNG in Florida to two TOTE ships operating in the Caribbean. TOTE's vessels would be the first large US ships to convert to LNG, and the company also plans to convert its two vessels that serve Alaska from the Port of Tacoma.
Meanwhile, for REI, does having two LNG plants of about the same size on Cook Inlet, REI's and ConocoPhillips', make sense? Does it also make sense with the looming possibility of a very large LNG plant, many times the REI size, also planned for Nikiski...
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