Sen. Sullivan touts Alaska LNG developments, but still no hard timeline

ANCHORAGE, Alaska (KTUU) - Senator Dan Sullivan, R-Alaska, is back in his home state while Congress remains on recess until after Easter.

In a sit-down interview with Alaska’s News Source on Wednesday, Sullivan discussed a few hot-button issues.

One being, the Senator believes we are closer than ever to getting a liquefied natural gas pipeline in Alaska. While he couldn’t lay out a timeline, Sullivan did point to a few recent events that have him optimistic.

“This has been a dream, as you know, for Alaskans for 50 years,” Sullivan started.

“Last week, we had a couple of things [happen] that I thought were important.”

“One, I hosted a meeting, kind of with all the key stakeholders [in Alaska LNG], so the Governor and his team, our whole Congressional Delegation. Glenfarne, which is the private sector company that’s now been, that’s building it out after their agreement with the Alaska Gas Line Development Corporation.”

“And the entire Trump White House, all the different cabinets from [Department of Defense] to Interior to Department of Energy to Commerce. They were all there, and this is kind of what I said, ‘hey, we need like a war room mentality with the private sector and the key federal agencies, and of course, the state of Alaska, to move this forward.’”

“So that was our first kind of war room meeting.”

Sullivan said that he had an important conversation last week with President Trump and members of his cabinet, suggesting that tariff negotiations include committing to purchasing Alaska LNG.

“I was pushing on an open door because they were already getting ready to do it,” explained Sullivan.

“The president and his team are negotiating these tariff agreements, right? So they’ve put a pause on the tariffs. They’re now trying to get our allies to do agreements with us.”

“And I said to the President, ‘Mr. President, if you’re doing an agreement with a key ally like Korea or Japan or Taiwan, please include this idea of not only reducing their tariffs on our products, but long term firm contracts to buy Alaska LNG,’ and the President said, ‘hey, Dan, I agree with that.’”

In terms of progress on an Alaska LNG pipeline and securing buyers, Sullivan points to his relationship with the Vice President of Taiwan, Bi-khim Hsiao.

“I had a Zoom meeting with her, and she said in that Zoom meeting, ‘Senator, we want to be the biggest and first buyer of Alaska LNG,’” said Sullivan.

“The governor was just in Taiwan, this is now the vice president telling me, ‘We are in. We’re going to do it,’ and when you have offtake agreements, long-term offtake contracts for Alaska LNG, then you can actually finance the project.”

The Senator admits that we aren’t there yet, but believes the right people want to see this project through. He also points to natural gas drying up in Cook Inlet as a reason for development, so we wouldn’t need to rely on suppliers like Mexico or Canada.

“Think about what we could have in Alaska if we had 50 to 100 years of low-cost, clean-burning Alaska gas,” Sullivan said with excitement.

“We could get a manufacturing base going here. We would supply all our military, of course, with Alaska LNG. We could, of course, supply Alaskans who need the gas. And our allies in Asia, too.”

“So there’s a lot going on here. We’re not there yet, but holy cow, it was a good week and I’m going to continue to put my shoulder into this really big project for our state.”

Sullivan said that he understands those who don’t believe this project will come to fruition, but won’t let skeptics stop him from trying.

“It’s normal to be skeptical when you’ve been hearing about this for almost a half century, but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t, that we should give up or it doesn’t mean that just because it hadn’t worked previously, it’s not going to work now,“ he expressed.

“We literally have the most powerful man and his cabinet in the world, who are trying to get this done. You may have seen the president raise the Alaska LNG project in his State of the Union address about six weeks ago. He raised it in his first meeting with the Japanese Prime Minister, and in fact, half of that meeting, the President of the United States, was pressing the Japanese Prime Minister.”

“I was at a dinner with President Trump after that meeting and his whole team was like, ‘Senator, you would have loved it. The president was pressing the Japanese Prime Minister for half the meeting on Alaska LNG.’”

“So we have a strong advocate, the whole cabinet. So we just got to get together and work together on this.”

“I can’t promise it. It’s not right around the corner.”

“Look, I’ve been working on this for over 15 years, way before I was a U.S. Senator. I’ve never seen the stakeholder lineup better in the opportunities to get this done, more promising than we have right now.”

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