In Nikiski, a community of a few thousand people in southern Alaska, the talk around town recently has been President Trump’s championing of a project called Alaska L.N.G.
In what would be the biggest energy investment in American history, the $44 billion plan involves shipping liquefied natural gas, or L.N.G., from fields in Alaska’s north to buyers in Japan and elsewhere in Asia. The project’s exports would run through Nikiski.
In America’s northernmost state, a project like Alaska L.N.G. has been sought after for decades with little progress. But more recently, it has become a centerpiece of the Trump administration’s efforts to boost U.S. fossil fuel production.
For Nikiski and its surrounding communities, Alaska L.N.G. would provide an economic lifeline.
Nikiski is perched on the Kenai Peninsula, a region south of Anchorage that has been dependent on local reserves of oil and gas for over half a century. In recent decades, those supplies have dwindled.
In Nikiski, the peninsula’s dense expanse of forests and lakes gives way to a coastline that is dotted with aging industrial facilities, many of which have been shut for years. Empty storefronts line the one main road through town.
“It’s no secret that the economic status of Alaska is not in good shape,” said Peter Ribbens, Nikiski’s representative on the Kenai Peninsula Borough Assembly. Like many in Nikiski, Mr. Ribbens came for a job in the energy sector, arriving in 1997 to work at an oil refinery.
“Having a chunk of petroleum hydrocarbons flowing to Japan would plug a whole lot of problems, not only in Nikiski,” he said, sitting in a recliner in the timber-frame home he built in the woods by a small lake on the outskirts of Nikiski.
Alaska L.N.G. has been a dream of officials in Alaska since the 1980s. However, it has made scant progress because of the formidable cost of building the infrastructure — an 800-mile pipeline across frozen land connecting gas fields in the state’s north to Nikiski, where it would be chilled into liquid form and loaded onto ships for export.
As decades dragged on without tangible signs of progress, hope in Nikiski was nearly extinguished, until recently.
Mr. Trump has pushed the Alaska L.N.G. project since his first day in office. His trade negotiators have invoked it with leaders in Asia, the region from which gas-purchase agreements would need to be secured for the project to get off the ground in its full capacity.
Glenfarne, a New York energy firm that recently took over as lead developer of the project, said this month that more than 50 companies had expressed interest in Alaska L.N.G. On Monday, the Thai state-owned oil and gas company PTT signed up to procure gas from the project for a 20-year period.
In Nikiski, Mr. Ribbens said the recent political climate had prompted a swell of excited chatter. He understands why some residents badly want the project to move forward, but he tries not to hide his own doubts. “I have been in Alaska since 1983,” Mr. Ribbens said. “My view on Alaska L.N.G. is show me the money.”
As in many parts of Alaska, the economy of the Kenai Peninsula Borough, which includes Nikiski, began with discoveries of oil and gas. Oil was first discovered within the nearby Cook Inlet Basin in 1957. Two years later, explorers struck vast natural gas reserves in the area.
The lure of abundant gas to power their operations helped draw a fertilizer plant and an oil refinery to Nikiski. In 1969, a facility wedged on the coast between those two plants began chilling natural gas to liquid form at minus 260 degrees Fahrenheit and shipping it on tankers to Japan.
As industrial production expanded in the 1980s, Nikiski’s economy boomed in tandem.
Peter Micciche, the mayor of the Kenai Peninsula Borough, was the superintendent of the Nikiski L.N.G. plant, beginning his career as a roustabout in 1985. He recalled that by the end of that decade, the area had its first streetlights, stop signs and McDonald’s.
“You had decades of very strong economic activity when these plants were all operating,” Mr. Micciche said. “Japan relied on us,” he added, and “oil and gas created an economy here that would have never existed.”
By the turn of the century, however, the natural gas reserves near Nikiski were beginning to dwindle. Nikiski’s fertilizer plant closed in 2007. Production was scaled back at the oil refinery. Contracted shipments from Nikiski’s L.N.G. plant to Japan stopped in 2011. The facility was mothballed in 2017.
Now, the once-bustling facilities on Nikiski’s shoreline sit mostly silent.
Long loading arms stretch from the plants toward docks in the blue-gray waters offshore. On a Friday last month, residents rode four-wheelers and walked along the rocky beach below searching for agates.
Along the main road leading from the old facilities to the town center, a handful of restaurants were shuttered. Sparse buildings, mostly churches and industrial parts suppliers, interrupted the trees lining the roadside.
“You feel it when you lose a substantial economic base,” said Mr. Ribbens, the Nikiski representative. “It’s not just operators, but a multiplier factor of restaurants and grocery stores and gas stations that support the base.”
Part of the hope attached to building the Alaska L.N.G. pipeline is that the availability of low-cost gas could lure industrial operators back to Nikiski, Mr. Ribbens said. “It’s totally rational that people want it to happen,” he said. “And if it’s something that you want, you start looking for reasons it’s going to.”
In Nikiski, 1.5 miles down the coastline from where the original L.N.G. export facility still stands, a grassy parcel of land has been set aside for the new Alaska L.N.G. terminal. The project’s operator has purchased more than a dozen homes in the area in anticipation of forward progress.
Louie Oliva was among the residents encouraged by the recent buzz created by Mr. Trump’s backing of Alaska L.N.G. His family’s hardware store, tucked away on a side road off Nikiski’s main artery, was on the verge of closing this year before Mr. Oliva, 45, took over operations.
Mr. Oliva said he had witnessed Nikiski “slowly die” over the years, along with the waning of local gas supplies. His sister, Amber Douglas, 44, who manages commercial sales at the store, said her son had recently graduated from the same Nikiski high school she attended more than two decades ago. His class was roughly half the size of her own.
Mr. Oliva and Ms. Douglas’s father had once worked on the trans-Alaska oil pipeline, the system completed in 1977 that funnels crude oil from Alaska’s North Slope southward. The proposed route of the Alaska L.N.G. pipeline would, in spots, parallel the massive oil project, which over its lifetime employed more than 70,000 workers and transformed Alaska’s economy.
“Oil and gas kept me and my family fed,” Mr. Oliva said. “It has been my family’s whole life.” Projects like the oil pipeline and the proposed gas one create jobs, he said. “They have the potential to change families for generations,” he added.
For Mr. Oliva and others in Nikiski, the question now is whether Alaska L.N.G. will be able to draw interest from buyers overseas.
With other L.N.G. projects advancing and the world increasingly turning to new, cleaner power sources, Mr. Trump’s attention on Alaska L.N.G. is seen by some officials in the state as providing a final window of opportunity to realize the long-sought venture.
Glenfarne, the project developer, plans to begin construction this year on a pipeline connecting the northern gas fields to Anchorage, just northeast of Nikiski, according to Adam Prestidge, an executive vice president at the company.
That portion of the project is commercially viable on its own, he said.
If Glenfarne is able to line up enough foreign buyers, it will extend the pipeline 30 miles to Nikiski, where it will also build the L.N.G. export terminal, Mr. Prestidge said. The Nikiski facility would account for about half of the project’s $44 billion budget.
For Mr. Micciche, the mayor of the Kenai Peninsula Borough and former superintendent of the Nikiski L.N.G. facility, proceeding with a scaled-back version of Alaska L.N.G. is not the ideal route. Should the pipeline end up supplying only local demand, it would carry just a small fraction of the amount of gas it would if it were exporting to buyers overseas.
In Mr. Micciche’s office, beneath a large bear mount given to him by a local restaurant owner, he still displays a red lacquered vase he received as a gift from the president of a former Japanese buyer of Nikiski L.N.G.
Alaska has an opportunity to reclaim its role as a global gas exporter, Mr. Micciche said, adding, “the question now is whether we can bring the economics together with adequate investment.” For the state’s future, he said, “I don’t think we have another option.”
River Akira Davis covers Japan for The Times, including its economy and businesses, and is based in Tokyo.
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