A Citizen’s Guide

Gov. Frank Murkowski on Friday pulled back from his vow to call legislators back into a third special session on a natural gas pipeline contract with North Slope petroleum producers.

Murkowski lost to Sarah Palin by a margin of almost 32 percent on the Republican gubernatorial ballot Tuesday.

“Obviously this is a change of circumstances here that has to be taken into account,” said Jim Clark, Murkowski’s chief of staff and lead gas pipeline negotiator.

“We’re looking into whether the necessary support from legislators and producers is there,” Clark said.

The decision about whether to proceed will be up to those players, Clark said. Read the rest of this entry »

Alaska Gasline Port Authority officials criticized Gov. Frank Murkowski’s pipeline proposal and charged his administration with being uncooperative as they defended their own project Friday on the second day of a Senate committee meeting in Fairbanks.

The debate at times pushed beyond project economics to a fundamental disagreement between the administration and the port authority over the interests of the state and its three major oil and gas producers.

Port authority chairman and Fairbanks North Star Borough Mayor Jim Whitaker argued that if the port authority project did prove more profitable, lawmakers and the administration would be legally obligated to force the companies to ship gas through it.

If they were unwilling to pressure the companies, he said, the state would end up with a less valuable project, no project for 30 years, or whatever is in the interest of BP, ConocoPhillips, and Exxon Mobil, with whom the administration negotiated the proposed pipeline contract. Read the rest of this entry »

Buoyed by Sarah Palin’s win in Tuesday’s Republican primary and by a favorable new study, representatives from the Alaska Gasline Port Authority continued their pitch to lawmakers Thursday during a Senate committee meeting at the Carlson Center in Fairbanks.

Port authority chairman and Fairbanks North Star Borough Mayor Jim Whitaker urged members of the Senate Special Committee on Natural Gas Development and other lawmakers to stop work on the natural gas pipeline proposal put forward by Gov. Frank Murkowski and his administration.

“We think it would be a mistake to continue with a contract that has some basic flaws,” he said.

Lawmakers and administration officials at the meeting challenged the findings of the new study, an economic analysis done by a legislative consultant, and had mixed reactions about the effect of Tuesday’s vote. Read the rest of this entry »

The Murkowski administration’s revisions to a proposed natural gas pipeline contract were due Wednesday, but state law requires several steps before the contract can be released. Since those weren’t done, the deadline passed without action.

The deadline fell the day after a primary election in which Gov. Frank Murkowski lost the Republican nomination, ending his hopes for a second term. He has just more than three months left in office.

Murkowski has said he will bring the Legislature back into its third special session on natural gas pipeline contract issues in September. He will need a much-revised contract to present at that time if he hopes to make any progress, according to several legislators.

Those revisions were officially due Wednesday. That’s because, under the state’s gas development act, the state revenue commissioner has 30 days from the end of public comment to give an amended contract to the governor. Read the rest of this entry »

Gov. Frank Murkowski’s legacy just got somewhere between a lot harder and impossible to secure, according to legislators past and present.

Murkowski, who lost Tuesday’s Republican primary election, made a natural gas pipeline deal with Alaska’s major oil companies the focus of his administration.

Murkowski could still find a deal that works in the next three months, but the lack of support from Alaska’s voters and the governor’s lame duck status undermine his traction, political observers say.

“Part of it is that these guys have some pretty tough races coming in November,” said Rep. John Coghill, R-North Pole and the House majority leader, of his legislative colleagues. “I think you’re going to see a lot of them trying to read that vote.” Read the rest of this entry »

Despite the promise in the proposed gas pipeline contract for an oil tax freeze, lawmakers last week passed an oil tax assuming, to some extent, that they would be able to change it down the road.

One big issue was how the credits for future natural gas development would affect the tax.

On the last day of the special session, Democratic lawmakers made impassioned pleas to remove the bill’s credits for gas, which they said would eat into tax revenue. Others downplayed the threat. Read the rest of this entry »