capital focus

Brian Wenzel of ConocoPhillips told the House Resources Committee this afternoon that his company was looking for 20 to 25 years of certainty on gas taxes to get a gas line going. The length of time is based on the expectation that gas leaseholders would have to commit to ship their gas for that long to enable the project financing.
If leaseholders are going to make a financial commitment worth potentially $150 billion, Wenzel said, “We ought to be able to take out that one form of uncertainty.” More »

Gov. Sarah Palin has responded to ConocoPhillips’ gas line proposal with a series of documents prepared by her gas line team and provided to lawmakers on the Senate Resources Committee. The documents include an overview of the proposal, a 17-page critique of it, and a list of nine “Questions Alaskans should ask ConocoPhillips.” More »

There’s been a lot of talk down here about airing out the gas line proposals that didn’t make it. Senate Resources will kick things off with a presentation this afternoon by ConocoPhillips, and House Republicans are also planning meetings.
Some of the impetus is to learn everything possible about pipeline economics and so on, but some is clearly to compare Conoco’s and other companies’ proposals against TransCanada’s, the only one that passed the AGIA test.
The hearings could be expected, but they also seem to reflect something of a distrust in the AGIA process.
My bad, said Joe Balash on Monday. More »

Last year, Rep. Jay Ramras was a Wal-Mart kind of gas line guy.
If you have a big open lot in a prime retail area, he argued, don’t put a McDonald’s in the middle of it — build a Wal-Mart and add the restaurant later. That is, don’t mess around with a 2 bcf all-Alaska line when the state could earn much more money from a 4 bcf line through Canada. More »

If you walk upstairs to the first floor of the Capitol and turn left right now, you’ll smell chocolate chip cookies. And I mean fresh chocolate chip cookies, baking.
The House Judiciary Committee is just starting a hearing, likely to be well attented, on bills dealing with “partial-birth” abortion and dual sentencing.
Rep. Jay Ramras of Fairbanks chairs the committee, and is apparently the cookie man in Fairbanks (did I miss something?). So it was by request that he’s now serving up fresh-baked cookies at his hearings.
A staff member was baking them in a big toaster oven in the back of the room.

I have to admit my enthusiam was not great for a Friday afternoon Senate Resources hearing on gas offtake rules, but it actually turned out to be fairly interesting.
For years, one of the questions in the background of the whole gas pipeline deal has been whether or not the state would even let it happen. The Alaska Oil and Gas Conservation Commission, an independent state agency charged with making sure fields are developed in ways that don’t waste the resource, ultimately gets to decide how much gas can be taken off from a field at a given time. (Keeping the gas underground increases oil production.) More »

“This is not buying toilet paper. This is a hundred-year decision.”
Sen. Gary Wilken on why it’s important to check under the rug before deciding anything big on the gas line. The reference was to the House majority press conference, in which AGIA was likened to other state procurement processes.

I just met with Bill Bjork of NEA-Alaska, and I gotta say it felt a little weird. I’ve had a few calls from various groups in my first days here asking to meet with me and discuss things like education funding and tourism. There’s nothing wrong with it, and I likely would have called these groups on my own if they hadn’t called me, but it sure feels like lobbying. More »

It might be a little early for sweeping assessments, but here’s mine.
Two days into the session, lawmakers are already split on the meaning of competition under AGIA, the gas line process the governor proposed last year and lawmakers approved nearly unanimously. More »

All of a sudden lawmakers are walking around with Blackberry phones on their hips. This is the first year the state has provided them, and already they’re causing something of a problem, or at least raising an issue. More »