In 1969 in Nikiski, a small community in southern Alaska, a team of gas industry pioneers set in motion something that would reshape the global energy landscape. They shipped the United States’ first liquefied natural gas across the Pacific Ocean to Japan.
Over the next five decades, similar projects proliferated across the United States and overseas. Liquefied natural gas, or L.N.G., has become a $130 billion global market. The United States is the largest supplier, and nations in Asia, including Japan, are its primary consumers.
In Nikiski, 10 years before that first shipment to Japan, explorers seeking oil in the nearby Cook Inlet Basin unearthed substantial reserves of natural gas. The challenge was whom to sell it to because the sparsely populated region was not a viable market.
The American companies Phillips Petroleum and Marathon Oil, key players in the area’s gas discoveries, turned their focus to Japan. Just an eight-day voyage 3,800 miles across the Pacific from Nikiski, Japan was undergoing rapid economic expansion and desperately needed energy, yet it lacked domestic supplies of oil, coal and gas.
In the 1960s, the Japanese utilities Tokyo Gas and Tokyo Electric Power deliberated a proposal to import gas, cooled to a liquid at minus 260 degrees Fahrenheit, from Nikiski. While a nascent L.N.G. trade existed at the time, the concept of transporting vast quantities of liquefied gas from a distant Alaskan outpost to Asia was unprecedented.
The Japanese companies decided to proceed, and in 1967 construction began on a liquefaction facility and export terminal in Nikiski.
Soon after the Nikiski plant opened in 1969, the Polar Alaska, an L.N.G. tanker, discharged its 30,000-ton cargo at a terminal south of Tokyo. Local news reports detailed Japanese officials anxiously awaiting the tanker’s early-morning arrival, poised to transfer gas so cold it would vaporize upon contact with an ice cube.
Every 11 days, tankers plied the route between Japan and Nikiski, delivering approximately 15 million barrels of L.N.G. annually. In Japan, this supply, which continued for more than four decades, helped power industry and millions of homes.
For many years, the Nikiski plant was the sole L.N.G. export facility in the United States, and Japan’s exclusive supplier. Alaskan officials tell stories about representatives from the Japanese buyers visiting Nikiski for technical exchanges and returning to Tokyo with Alaskan salmon in tow.
The original project was so successful that other energy companies in Japan and neighboring countries pursued similar initiatives, turning the Asia region into the world’s largest importer of L.N.G. Last year, China, Japan and South Korea collectively accounted for nearly half of all global imports.
On the supply side, Nikiski’s pioneering L.N.G. project was followed by a decades-long lull in the United States. While new L.N.G. ventures took off in places like Australia and Qatar during the 1990s and 2000s, the second American L.N.G. export terminal, in Louisiana, didn’t start until 2016.
It was around this time that the technologies of the shale gas revolution were unlocking large and previously inaccessible natural gas reserves across the continental United States. By 2023, the United States had become the world’s largest exporter of L.N.G.
But as shipments from the lower 48 states have burgeoned, natural gas exports from Alaska have vanished. Around the turn of the century, reserves in the southern Cook Inlet Basin near Nikiski began to dwindle. In 2017, the Nikiski L.N.G. plant — the longest continuously running facility of its kind in the world — was mothballed.
In Alaska, a project aimed at delivering gas from huge reserves in the state’s north to buyers in Asia has been in the works for decades. It would be a boon for the state. But it has made little progress because of the immense cost of transporting gas via pipeline to Alaska’s south for export.
In recent months, the project, called Alaska L.N.G., has received new attention because of backing from the Trump administration and a new developer. Still, analysts say it faces a number of challenges, including competition from projects in progress elsewhere in the United States.
If launched in its full capacity, Alaska L.N.G. would export gas from a new, multibillion-dollar facility in Nikiski.
River Akira Davis covers Japan for The Times, including its economy and businesses, and is based in Tokyo.
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