At 8 a.m. this morning the parties to the dispute regarding access to the Cook Inlet Gas Gathering System, or CIGGS, filed a settlement with the Regulatory Commission of Alaska, Scott Pfoff, president and CEO of Aurora Power Resources, told the Kenai Chapter of the Alaska Support Industry Alliance at the chapter’s Sept. 27 meeting.
“We think we’ve cracked it,” Pfoff said. “It was absolutely in my mind essential for that to happen.”
The privately operated CIGGS pipeline system transports gas from the Trading Bay area on the west side of the Cook Inlet to the fertilizer and LNG plants on the east side of the inlet. Agrium, the owner of the Nikiski fertilizer plant, filed a petition with RCA in October 2004 requesting that CIGGS be regulated — Agrium argued that the private operation of CIGGS was an obstacle to new industrial gas supplies to Nikiski.
However, on May 26, 2005, Agrium, the Cook Inlet gas producers and the State of Alaska entered mediation, to negotiate a resolution to the CIGGS dispute. On June 24 the parties to the dispute notified RCA that they had reached an agreement in principle. Since then the parties have been hammering out the terms for the commercial operation of CIGGS under the agreement, to reach a settlement of the dispute.
Editor’s note: See full story in the Oct. 2 issue of Petroleum News.
