Cook Inlet could welcome Greek traffic in the form of liquefied natural gas shipping containers if a new Alaska LNG Project partnership comes to fruition.
The owner and developer of the gasline megaproject announced Tuesday it will partner with Danaos Shipping Company Limited to ferry liquefied natural gas out of a planned liquefaction facility in Nikiski. The partnership is not a binding agreement and comes ahead of Glenfarne Group’s go or no-go development decision on the Alaska LNG Project.
If it’s built, the Alaska LNG Project would move natural gas from the North Slope to the Kenai Peninsula Borough through a roughly 800-mile pipeline. From there, the gas would be turned into liquid at a facility in Nikiski and shipped overseas. A portion of the gas would be reserved for in-state use by Alaskans.
Nikiski is where Danaos shipping containers would be waiting to deliver the liquid gas to customers in places like Japan and Taiwan.
Through the partnership, Glenfarne says Danaos would “facilitate the construction and operation” of at least six liquefied natural gas carriers. Those are refrigerated containers that remain cold enough to keep the natural gas in liquid form while it’s moved.
The company did not say what the storage capacity of each Danaos vessel would be. The project’s maximum annual liquefied natural gas output is estimated to be 20 million tons.
The partnership also includes a $50 million investment in development capital for the project from Danaos. High costs have previously stymied progress of the Alaska LNG Project. The most recent public estimates put the price tag around $44 billion, though Glenfarne brought on a company last year to update that number.
Earlier this month, Glenfarne confirmed it had a new cost estimate, but said it would not publish the new amount.
Danaos is the second company with which Glenfarne has announced a strategic partnership, though the company has netted a handful of nonbinding offtake agreements from would-be natural gas customers. Glenfarne and POSCO International Corporation, of Korea, announced a partnership last year for the steel that would be used to build the 42-inch diameter pipeline.
