He said 97 percent of power plants being built now or being planned are fired by natural gas. The council is charged with promoting the Alaska Highway route, which would follow the trans-Alaska oil pipeline from Prudhoe Bay to Fairbanks, where it would turn down the Alaska Highway to the Canadian province of Alberta to join existing gas transmission lines into the Lower 48. Cook Inlet has existing facilities, infrastructure, a trained work force and offers easy delivery. He pointed out that the Agrium fertilizer plant is the single largest taxpayer and the largest private-sector employer in the borough. Navarre pointed out that there is about 13 years of natural gas left in Cook Inlet at the present rate of use.
Natural gas is a fine feed stock for creating plastics and chemicals.
He said that's the advantage Cook Inlet has over another groups' plan to run a spur line to Valdez, where a mountain would have to be leveled just to build the terminus facility. If we go with a route down the highway without options for Alaska, we'll just be another third-world country exporting our natural resources. But today we have a different possibility. Then, we were cash-starved and shipped oil out as a raw product. Today, we ship a finished product, with value added, to the rest of the world.