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Prospective pipelines update conference
Kristen Nelson Petroleum News
TransCanada Alaska and Denali—The Alaska Gas Pipeline both began work this summer and both plan open seasons in 2010, company representatives said at the annual Resource Development Council conference Nov. 20. The TransCanada schedule calls for completing its initial open season in July 2010; Denali plans to begin its initial open season before the end of 2010.
Bud Fackrell, named president of Denali, a joint BP-ConocoPhillips project, in June, said Denali was formed because the owner companies “hold extensive gas resources on the North Slope” and because an Alaska gas pipeline project is the kind of massive project that major oil and gas companies do all over the world.
Since the company was formed in April a project team has been mobilized, office space has been acquired and the company has begun the pre-filing process with the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission and submitted a right-of-way application to the Bureau of Land Management for the federal lands the pipeline will cross in Alaska.
The company also completed a summer field program, Fackrell said, with some 80 people in the field. The estimated spend for 2008 is $60 million.
Fackrell said the work is aimed at understanding the cost of the pipeline — what the cost will be and “the variables associated with that before we go into an open season.”
He said Denali is engaged in an infrastructure upgrade study, and had people at an infrastructure summit the previous day.
“The infrastructure of the Haul Road and the TAPS pipeline is very old,” he said and roads and bridges need to be upgraded now, “this cannot wait for two or three years.”
“A pipeline project in the end is about logistics — it’s about moving people; it’s about moving equipment; it’s about moving pipe. And you have to have the infrastructure in place to have that happen,” he said.
Waiting for license Tony Palmer, vice president of Alaska business development for TransCanada Corp. and president of TransCanada Alaska, said TransCanada had not yet received its Alaska Gasline Inducement Act license, but expected it would be issued the following week — the last week of November, 90 days after the governor signed the Legislature’s approval of granting an AGIA license to TransCanada. (Alaska Commissioner of Revenue Pat Galvin told Petroleum News in an e-mail that the state expected to issue the license the first week in December.)
The AGIA license provides for matching funds up to $500 million for specified work, but Palmer said that “to maintain the schedule that we had proposed” the company did some weather-sensitive work this summer, so it could do desktop work this winter, kicking the project off in August to keep it on schedule for completion of an open season in July of 2010.
TransCanada has not pre-filed with FERC, Palmer said, because based on the company’s operation of the “largest natural gas pipeline system in North America,” and the many pipelines it has built under the FERC process its experience is that “the key elements of a complete request for pre-filing with FERC include a proposed filing schedule and detailed project description; contact with agencies and agreements to participate; a list of stakeholders and description of public participation program” and having the public participation program well under way.
As with any of its pipeline projects, “prior to pre-filing, we’ll be commencing consultation with permitting agencies over the next several months,” Palmer said.
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