Alaska Gasline Development Corp. President and CEO Keith Meyer directly addressed what he sees as one of the biggest challenges to building a gasline during his first board of directors meeting July 14, and it had nothing to do with the cost of the project.<\/p>\n
\u201cAGDC has an observable poor relationship with key legislators and legislative committees. I\u2019ve seen it in the press and I\u2019ve felt it in the (legislative) hearings. This has to change,\u201d Meyer said July 14 during a presentation to the board.<\/p>\n
About two weeks earlier, legislators peppered Meyer with questions for more than four hours during a marathon joint House-Senate Resources Committee hearing in which he, and representatives from the producers, gave their perspectives on the status of the in-flux Alaska LNG Project.<\/p>\n
The June 29 hearing in Anchorage was the first time legislators were able to hold a dialogue with Meyer in a public forum, so many of the questions naturally focused on his experience in the natural gas industry and his knowledge and view of the proposed North Slope gas megaproject.<\/p>\n
While the lines of questioning from some legislators exuded understandable skepticism in Meyer\u2019s proposal to reshape the financing structure of the project, others bordered on interrogation backed by clear and immediate opposition to nearly everything he said.<\/p>\n
The significant underlying problem with that, according to Meyer, is it doesn\u2019t sit well with the \u201cother\u201d key partners in a gasline and it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.<\/p>\n
\u201cWhen the utility buyers or the (potential) investors see \u2018AGDC is not experienced enough to do this project,\u2019 who\u2019s going to want to invest in that project if the government is saying AGDC, which is presumably a government entity, isn\u2019t experienced enough to do this and at the same time AGDC is the only dog willing to pull the sled, willing to step into the lead?\u201d Meyer questioned.<\/p>\n
He added: \u201cThen you\u2019re basically saying the one party willing to lead this project isn\u2019t experienced, doesn\u2019t have the competency, nobody\u2019s going to invest in that if they\u2019re also reading \u2014 the Asian buyers, face it, they are our most attractive market \u2014 when they read that they\u2019re not welcome investors in this project, well guess what, they\u2019re not going to be. They\u2019re not going to want to be investors.\u201d<\/p>\n