newsminer.com

Bit of a surprise this morning with the arrival of former Gov. Wally Hickel. He wasn’t on the schedule, but was given a chance to make his case.

Hickel's case? Forget TransCanada.

“I urge you to deny the TransCanada plan,” he told lawmakers in Anchorage. “If you don’t, we will lose control of our gas and Alaska will be locked into the market at the end of the pipeline in Alberta.”

Hickel argued instead that the state should build a pipeline itself, to Valdez, where gas could be shipped to Asian markets.

The former governor has long been aligned with the Alaska Gasline Port Authority, but this sets him apart. Port authority officials seem somewhat split, but have tentatively endorsed the TransCanada plan.

Hickel’s testimony was impassioned and contained a number of contentious claims, if not outright errors. The administration is planning to respond to it this afternoon.

The rest of the morning was spent studying the economics of the pipeline project under different circumstances -- if Point Thomson gas isn’t available, if no extra gas is ever found, if gas prices tank, if construction costs shoot up, and so on.

Consultants hired by the administration offered their analysis, which shows that the project is still economic in some extreme bad-case scenarios.