The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission has denied Yukon Pacific Co.’s request for more time to start building its long-proposed liquefied natural gas facility at Anderson Bay near Valdez, Alaska.
“Thus after May 22, 2010, your authority to construct and operate an LNG export terminal at the Anderson Bay site will no longer be valid,” wrote Jeff Wright, director the FERC’s Office of Energy Projects, in a letter dated May 14 to Yukon Pacific’s attorney.
The FERC approved the LNG project on May 22, 1995, with a stipulation that construction begin within three years of the commission’s order. The FERC subsequently granted several three-year extensions of that deadline.
Yukon Pacific’s latest request for more time is denied because a 1995 environmental impact statement is “outdated and can no longer be used to support the authorization of this project,” Wright’s letter said.
Wright wrote that “numerous changes in regulatory requirements since 1995, from both an environmental and safety perspective,” must now be addressed.
He added this denial “will not have any direct bearing on any future consideration of an LNG export option for the eventual marketing of Alaskan natural gas outside of the state, including the refiling of an application for Yukon Pacific’s project.”
“At this point I do not know what, if anything, CSX plans to do in response,” Patrick Rock, the Washington, D.C., attorney for Yukon Pacific, told Petroleum News in an e-mail.
Transportation giant CSX holds a more than 90 percent interest in Yukon Pacific, which has been trying to put together an LNG export project for Alaska North Slope gas since the 1980s.
