Development of the $65 billion Alaska LNG Project moved ahead Tuesday with the submission of a formal request to the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) to start the pre-file process for the major natural gas project.
The filing marks the start of the environmental review process required to win siting, design, construction permits.
The Alaska LNG project is owned by Alaska Gasline Development Corporation and affiliates of ExxonMobil, TransCanada, BP and ConocoPhillips.
The project is projected to cost between $45 billion to $65 billion and is expected to produce and export up to 20 million metric tons of LNG per year.
The FERC filing comes on the heels of a second season of summer field work that is part of the project’s $500 million pre-front-end engineering design phase.
The necessary data to support environmental permitting and the routing and sitting of project facilities will be complete by the end of the field work.
The proposed project facilities include a liquefaction facility in the Nikiski area on the Kenai Peninsula, an 800 mile pipeline, up to eight compression stations, at least five take-off points for in-state gas delivery, a gas treatment plant located on the North Slope and transmission lines to transport gas from Prudhoe Bay and Point Thomson to the gas treatment plant.
The Alaska LNG project will produce about 15,000 jobs during construction and approximately 1,000 jobs its operation.
An application for an LNG export license was submitted to the U.S. Department of Energy in July.
