Most of TransCanada/ExxonMobil's proposed 1,717-mile natural gas pipeline from Alaska's North Slope would be built in Canada, where it faces government scrutiny remarkably similar to the oversight under way in the United States. Canadian government agencies federal, provincial and territorialstill must issue final approvals for the pipeline project. They are empowered to ensure the pipeline is designed, constructed and operated safely. They have a strong environmental voice over the project. This includes say-so on how the pipeline crosses streams, how land may be disturbed to trench and assemble the pipe, and what happens when the pipeline path penetrates acreage used by woodland caribou and other important wildlife. But there's one significant difference between U.S. and Canadian oversight: The pipeline project sponsor already has in hand some important Canadian authorizationsincluding arguably the most important ones of all, federal certificates to build and operate the pipeline. While the U.S. and Canadian governments both approved the gas pipeline project when it was initially proposed in the 1970s, project sponsors in the U.S. later gave up their rights. However, that 1970s-era pipeline project, with its certificates in hand, continues to exist in Canada. And the Alaska Pipeline Projecta joint effort of TransCanada Corp. and ExxonMobilhas structured the Canadian portion of its multibillion-dollar pipeline proposal around the plan that first gelled when Jimmy Carter was U.S. president, "Laverne & Shirley" was the top-rated TV show and Alaskans were taking their first strides as newly christened oil tycoons.
No Alaska natural gas can physically cross the border into Canada without a handful of government agencies - in the United States and Canada - blessing the event. But getting government permission for the gas itself to leave Alaska and enter Canada on its way to Lower 48 markets will be a relative snap compared to the years-long ordeal to sanction construction of the proposed multibillion-dollar natural gas pipeline from Alaska's North Slope. It's like the difference between issuing a hall pass to the school nurse's office vs. actually building the school.
EIA downloadable gis energy information for the US; includes shapefiles for data on Coal Mines - Surface and Underground, Crude Oil Pipelines, Liquefied Natural Gas Import/Export Terminals, Natural Gas Interstate and Intrastate Pipelines, Natural Gas Market Hubs, NGL Pipelines, Petroleum Product Pipelines, Petroleum Refineries, Petroleum Terminals, Power Plants, and Strategic Petroleum Reserves.
A federal loan guarantee authorized for the Alaska gas pipeline is intended to help smooth the path forward for what could be the world's most expensive private project ever. The guarantee joins other measures in federal law designed to ease the project ahead and lower its capital costs. The other measures include putting a key regulator on a timetable to act, accelerating the pipeline depreciation for tax savings, restricting court challenges of the project, and allowing tax credits for a massive gas treatment plant at Prudhoe Bay.
The proposed multibillion-dollar natural gas pipeline into Canada would be buried for almost its entire 803-mile length within Alaska with only a few exceptions, including where it bridges earthquake faults.
Building a major pipeline to carry stranded North Slope natural gas to market would boost the number of jobs and wealth in Alaska. But the impact would be muted compared to the economic upheaval from building the trans-Alaska oil pipeline 35 years ago. That's a key conclusion of a draft economic analysis,prepared by the gas line project developer and released Jan. 13, that forecasts how life in Alaska would change if the proposed $32 billion to $41 billion pipeline from the North Slope to Alberta gets built.
EIA launched a new liquids pipeline projects database that tracks more than 200 pipeline projects for crude oil, hydrocarbon gas liquids (HGL), and other petroleum products. The database contains project information such as project type, start date, capacity, mileage, and geographic information for historical (completed since 2010) and future pipeline projects. The information in the database is based on the latest public information from company documents, government filings, and trade press, but it does not reflect any assumptions on the likelihood or timing of project completion. The liquids pipeline projects database complements EIA’s natural gas pipeline projects table.
Alaskans who draw North Slope natural gas from the proposed large-volume pipeline would pay only a tiny fraction of the multibillion-dollar project's construction and operating cost. That's because of long-standing federal and state laws that say gas shippers should pay for only the proportion of the pipeline system they use. These policies are designed to hold down prices that consumers along the pipeline pay and to keep small gas shippers from being discriminated against. The gas taken off in the state won't be free - Alaskans still would pay many millions of dollars annually to receive gas shipped from Prudhoe Bay or other North Slope fields.
What would happen to Alaska's natural gas once it reaches the end of the proposed pipeline, 1,700 miles from Prudhoe Bay? The gas would flow into a vast network of Canadian and U.S. pipelines assembled over the past 60 years. Some key components of that network were built or expanded in the early 1980s in anticipation of Alaska gas starting to flow back then. Those components went into service without Alaska gas and helped Canada double its natural gas exports to the United States in the 1980s, then double them again in the 1990s. In all, the entire network today can move 15 billion to 20 billion cubic feet a day of natural gas, roughly three to four times the volume the Alaska pipeline would deliver to the British Columbia-Alberta border northwest of Edmonton. Of course, the network still moves billions of cubic feet of gas daily. But the volume it handles has been declining, leaving room for Alaska gas, and even if the flow is relatively flush when the Alaska pipeline is finished, the network's capacity could be expanded. No longer is there serious talk of needing a pipeline stretching all the way from Prudhoe Bay to Chicago. But why end the Alaska pipeline near the B.C.-Alberta border as opposed to somewhere else? The answer is simple: Three major North American gas pipeline systems converge there, in the heart of some of Canada's hottest natural gas plays.
During late spring 2011, two small airplanes flew dozens of sorties over key transportation corridors bisecting Alaska. Seated in the back of each plane was a technician, surely with an iron-lined stomach and extraordinary sense of equilibrium, enduring the pitching, rolling and yawing while the pilot maintained a nearly constant altitude above terrain that is anything but constant. Like bombardiers dropping payloads on air-raid targets, the technicians released millions of laser pulses from the planes' bellies, pelting the ground and capturing the pulses' echoes. The entire mission involved a relatively new technology called lidar. It was part of a multiagency effort to understand, map and put into the public realm the precise landscape a North Slope natural gas pipeline would cross. The data gathered trillions of bytes of data is now getting posted on a state of Alaska website.And state geologists and geophysicists who commissioned the lidar research their first foray into the technology are now getting an extraordinary look at the Earth's surface in a swath of Alaska never before detailed in such sharp relief.
This month, a small team of federal officials will visit a handful of Alaska villages to discuss with local tribal leaders the proposed multibillion-dollar gas pipeline project one government to another. The meetings or consultations, as they're called stem from an 18-year-old presidential mandate for federal agencies to engage Native American tribes, and to listen and consider their concerns before taking actions that affect the tribes. That mandate grew out of a new federal approach to Native relations that repudiated two centuries of policies that marginalized Native Americans, their culture and their relations with the land
A multimillion-dollar effort is moving ahead to understand how the proposed Alaska gas pipeline project would change the physical, economic, social and cultural environments along the line's path through the state. The Federal Energy Regulatory Commissionis leading the environmental review of the $32 billion to $41 billion project that would pipe 4.5 billion cubic feet a day of North Slope natural gas through Canada to the Lower 48.
About one-third of the Alaska gas pipeline project cost has little to do with physically burying steel pipe along hundreds of miles of the northern continent. Instead, this major piece of the overall project would center on a 155-acre patch at the Prudhoe Bay oil field that would house a massive complex of structures known as the gas treatment plant. The plant's cost has been estimated at $12 billion, compared with a total project cost of $32 billion to $41 billion. It would be the most expensive complex of buildings ever assembled in Alaska.
Squads of scientists this summer have joined the caribou and Dall sheep, eiders and eagles, moose and muskrat, salmon and grayling that inhabit the proposed natural gas pipeline route through Alaska. The scientists are there to catalog, cross-check and verify the exact nature of that route - from the animals to the permafrost and faults - before the first trench can be carved for the major pipeline from Alaska through Canada.
The proposed Alaska natural gas pipeline projects are engaged in the "precedent agreement" phase of development. A pipeline developer that has signed enough precedent agreements with enough shippers for enough of its pipeline capacity holds strong evidence that the market is willing to pay for the project. The developer then can seek formal government permission to build the pipeline and go to financial markets for construction financing - two steps usually needed before construction can begin.
This geographic information system combines detailed information and location coordinates for oil wells, gas wells, and pipelines from the Commission's files with base map data captured from U.S. Geological Survey 7.5 minute quadrangle maps. These interactive maps were developed using Environmental Systems Research Institute, Inc. (ESRI) ArcIMS software, and interface with the Commission's Production Data Query and Drilling Permit Query applications.
The geographic dataarebuilt fromtheTechnical Information Management System (TIMS). TIMS consists of two separate databases: an attribute database and a spatial database.The attribute information for offshore activities is stored in theTIMSdatabase. The spatial database is a combination of the ARC/INFO and FINDER databases and contains all the coordinates and topology information for geographic features.The attribute and spatial databases are interconnected through the use of common data elements in both databases,thereby creating the spatial datasets. The data in the mapping filesaremade up of straight-line segments.If an arc existed in the original data, it has been replaced with a series of straight lines that approximate the arc.The Gulf of Mexico OCS Region stores all its mapping data in longitude and latitude format.All coordinates are in NAD 27. Data can be obtained in threetypes of digitalformats: ASCII: American Standard Code for Information Interchange is plain text format where a string of 7 binary digits represents each character. E00: An ArcInfo interchange file format used for system independent exchange of geographic information system (GIS) coverages and associated data. DXF: Drawing Exchange File is a two-dimensional graphics file format supported by PC-based CAD products. DXF data includes no topology.
The National Pipeline Mapping System (NPMS) Public Viewer enables the user to view NPMS pipeline, liquefied natural gas (LNG) plant and breakout tank data one county or offshore area at a time, including attributes and pipeline operator contact information. The user can also view gas transmission and hazardous liquid pipeline accidents and incidents going back to 2002 for the entire US. NPMS pipeline data consists of gas transmission pipelines and hazardous liquid pipelines jurisdictional to PHMSA. It does not contain gas gathering or distribution pipelines, such as lines which deliver gas to a customer 's home. Therefore, not all pipelines in an area will be visible in the Public Viewer. As well, the breakout tank data is not complete as submission of that data is not a requirement. All NPMS data is for reference purposes only. It should never be used as a substitute for contacting a one-call center prior to excavation activities. Please call 811 before any digging occurs. To view the data, select a state or the federal waters category and then a county or offshore area from the drop-down lists below. To view another county or offshore area, click the Change County link at the top right corner of the map window. Please note that the Public Viewer limits the scale of pipeline maps, in accordance with PHMSA's security policy. When you are zoomed in closer than a 1:24,000 scale (above zoom level 14), you will notice that the pipelines have disappeared from the map. In order to see the pipelines, you must either zoom out to zoom level 14 or lower. Data cannot be downloaded from the Public Viewer. The boundary between counties and offshore state waters is for display purposes only and is not an official boundary.