Enbridge wants a piece of the pipeline

The head of the Canadian pipeline firm Enbridge is again expressing interest in owning a piece of a producer-led natural gas pipeline from Alaska’s North Slope, according to media reports.

After an annual meeting on May 7, company CEO Pat Daniel told reporters that Enbridge has had “informal” discussions with BP and ConocoPhillips about possibly participating in their $30 billion “Denali — The Alaska Gas Pipeline,” according to a Calgary Herald report.

“We’ve always said if we were at a position of 10 to 20 percent that would be of interest to us,” Daniel told the Herald. “That would be our objective, but of course it’s all academic at this point — we don’t have a position in the line yet.”

Covering the same event, Reuters reported that BP and ConocoPhillips called Enbridge about the project before announcing it to the public in early April. Media reports around that announcement mentioned Enbridge as a potential partner.

Enbridge has aligned with the North Slope producers in a previous, but failed, gas line effort under the Murkowski administration. And last August, Daniel said his company told the Palin administration it would not participate in any pipeline that did not have the backing of North Slope resource owners.

In developed North Slope oil fields, BP, ConocoPhillips and ExxonMobil currently have under lease roughly 25 percent of northern Alaska’s estimated onshore recoverable natural gas reserves, the bulk of which is contained in the Prudhoe Bay oil field, which contains about 24 trillion cubic feet of natural gas.

The Denali pipeline is rivaling a proposal by the other major Canadian pipeline company TransCanada to build a similar pipeline through a state-led effort.

— Petroleum News