Alaska voters approved by a wide margin Tuesday a ballot initiative to create the Alaska Natural Gas Development Authority as a public corporation of the state for the purpose of acquiring North Slope gas and building a pipeline to deliver supplies to Port Valdez in Prince William Sound, where the gas would be liquefied and marketed to the Lower 48 states.

The timeline for establishing the Authority, which would maintain and operate the pipeline, will be established by Governor-elect Frank Murkowski, who plans to leave the U.S. Senate in a few weeks and assume the office of governor on Dec. 2, said Julie Hammonds, deputy press secretary for outgoing Gov. Tony Knowles.

The timely creation of the Authority could be hampered by the financial crisis now facing Alaska, she said. Hammonds noted Alaska has a “massive gap” of approximately $500 million between its income from mostly oil royalties and its expenses. The Authority, however, would have the power to issue state tax-exempt bonds to cover construction costs, according to the ballot initiative.

The ballot initiative, which was approved by a vote of 117,678 to 74,393, was partly in response to Alaskans’ “frustration” with the slow pace at which the domestic energy industry and Congress are moving to build a North Slope pipeline and open up the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR) to oil and natural gas drilling, she said.

With renewed efforts to get an Alaskan pipeline built to deliver supply to the Lower 48, David Welch, BP’s president of Alaska-Canada Gas, said that while a number of these LNG proposals have been discussed, “none of them have actually gotten any traction.” BP is one of three Alaska producers spearheading the drive to build a gas pipeline from the North Slope to continental U.S. markets.

“As a resource owner up there, we are only sponsoring the pipeline because we want to get our gas to market,” said Welch during an interview with Daily GPI Thursday. “We would welcome any viable way to monetize our gas. However, we have studied things like LNG, chemical conversion of natural gas to liquids and pipelines, and the pipeline is the closest thing to being economically viable of any of the alternatives that we have looked at…If anyone can come up with an economically viable proposal that gets a wellhead net-back, we would be willing to consider that, but it doesn’t feel like that’s as likely of a way to monetize gas as the pipeline.”

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