Resources Energy, Inc. Spearheads LNG Development: company looks for investors for innovative Southcentral project.

• Author: Stricker, Julie
• Position: OIL & GAS

While several large-scale proposals to develop and market Alaska natural gas have been discussed in the past decades, one spearheaded by a Japanese consortium has a plan and a goal and is steadily working to meet them.

Resources Energy, Inc. (REI) wants to build and operate a liquefied natural gas (LNG) plant in Alaska that would provide relatively low-cost LNG to Japan. The project came about after the 2011 Fukushima earthquake and tsunami drove home the vulnerability of Japan's nuclear energy system. In July, according to the World Nuclear Association, "forty-two of the country's fifty-plus main reactors are operable and potentially able to restart, and twenty-four of these are in the process of restart approvals. The first two restarted in August and October 2015."

With energy prices rising at home, Japanese officials began to look abroad for new, clean sources of energy, focusing on Alaska, with its vast natural gas deposits.

According to a January 2013 feasibility study, the project's goal is to trigger an early flow of North Slope and Cook Inlet natural gas, which would answer Alaska's energy needs as well as create opportunities for exporting LNG to Japan. The Cook Inlet LNG project would also be a springboard to future Alaska opportunities.

Advantage Alaska

A project based in Alaska has many things going for it, according to REI's Vice President and Anchorage Office General Manager Mary Ann Pease, who joined the company in 2012. Pease gave an update on the project in July. The preliminary estimate of project values in September 2014 equaled "$2.85 billion; $1.35 billion for the LNG liquefication facility and power plant and $1.5 billion for feedgas supply and related infrastructure," according to the REI LNG Export Project AIDEA Infrastructure Development Project Summary Matrix.

Pease has a background in Alaska telecommunications and utility projects and also served as former Alaska Governor Frank Murkowski's gas pipeline advisor. Pease also was a consultant to the Alaska Natural Gas Development Authority.

"Our schedule has been very consistent," she says. "There is a window opening for the right amount of gas specifically that will come from this project--1 million tons--in the 2020 time frame. That is very much one of the guiding principles to this project."

The timing is right to create an export market to Japan, Pease says. The country has fully deregulated the electric industry and is in the process of deregulating the gas and...