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Yukon Pacific negotiating with mayors to manage gas project
Kristen Nelson PNA News Editor
Yukon Pacific Corp. — the company with all of the major permits needed to build a gas pipeline from the North Slope to Valdez and a liquefied natural gas plant at Anderson Bay — is in negotiations with mayors of the communities which will vote in early October to approve a port authority to build a gas pipeline and LNG facility.
And not, Yukon Pacific’s Wayne Lewis told PNA Aug. 16, just in negotiations for use of the permits the company holds.
The pipeline mayors and Yukon Pacific are exchanging drafts of agreements which would have Yukon Pacific representing the mayors and overseeing the project.
Fairbanks summit The three days of meetings in Fairbanks the week of Aug. 6, Lewis said, were the first time all three mayors and their representatives, bond counsel from O’Melveny & Myers, Yukon Pacific, Williams Cos. and Bechtel, all met in one place.
And those three days, Lewis said, involved “very detailed discussions so the companies could come to understand the port authority concept and a free-ranging exchange of information and ideas so that participants could all define opportunities and roles.”
Bechtel, a global engineering-construction organization, “has a long history with Yukon Pacific,” Lewis said. Bechtel did a lot of the preliminary pipeline and liquefied natural gas plant design for Yukon Pacific’s trans-Alaska gas system.
The Williams Cos., known in Alaska for refining and for their gas stations and convenience stores (formerly Mapco) owns and operates more than 27,000 miles of pipeline in the Lower 48 and is the largest volume transporter of natural gas in the United States.
With the background both Williams and Bechtel have in Alaska, Lewis said, they “hit the ground running as far as a trans-Alaska gas system goes.”
Role of Yukon Pacific And Yukon Pacific, Lewis said, is in discussions with the pipeline mayors to define the company’s role.
There are two separate questions, he said. First, the role of Yukon Pacific in representing the mayors — and ultimately the port authority — in advancing the project. Second, there are discussions about valuing the permits Yukon Pacific has, permits which are, he said, “fundamental to the advancement of any project.”
The port authority, Lewis said, would be the successor to Gasline Now!, the group formed by the mayors a few years ago to find a way to get North Slope gas to market.
That group, for which the port authority will be the successor, “is looking to Yukon Pacific to act as its representative in most phases — overseeing marketing, engineering, permitting — for the project,” Lewis said.
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