Alaska cuts loose incredibly expensive natural gas pipeline consultant.

Courtesy of Alaska Dispatch:  

A highly paid attorney who earned more than $850,000 working on Alaska’s proposed gas pipeline project no longer works for the state and is unlikely to return, Gov. Bill Walker said Friday. 

Rigdon Boykin, a commercial attorney, earned up to $120,000 monthly working as a negotiator for the state before his contract with the Alaska Gasline Development Corp. was terminated Nov. 30. 

Boykin was paid $750,000 by the corporation, plus another $100,000 by Walker’s office under a separate contract. 

In an interview Friday morning, Walker said the state had “changed up the team a bit.”

The article goes on to quote Walker's defense of Boykin's work, and his claim that the state "got it's money's worth" out of  Boykin

Bullshit!

The evidence for that, according to Governor Walker, is a commitment from BP and ConocoPhilips that IF a pipeline were constructed they would negotiate sales of the gas. That's like promising to build a stable for my unicorn once I capture it.

Never gonna happen.

I have been hearing about this fabled natural gas pipeline for almost forty years now.

I have also heard that Jesus is coming back.

I assume both of these events will take place on the same day.

Our dearly departed friend Joe McGinnis wrote perhaps the definitive argument for why there will never be a gas pipeline in his article Pipe Dreams:

The first thing I learned about the pipeline was that the reason nobody had built it in 30 years was that nobody could have made any money by doing so. Here’s how it works: You decide to build a pipeline to carry gas from Point A to Point B, and you spend a couple of years scoping out a route and putting together a cost estimate. Then you have what in the gas business is called an open season, when you try to persuade whoever has gas to commit in advance to shipping it through your pipeline for, let’s say, 25 years. Once you’ve signed up your shippers, you go to a bank, and the bank loans you the money you need to build the pipeline. Once you have your financing, you go to the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission in Washington and ask for a permit. They check your shipping commitments, your financing, and about a zillion other things, and if they like the way things look, they issue the permit. Then you build the line, and the gas starts to flow and keeps flowing for 25 years or more, and everybody makes a ton of money. 

But with natural gas selling for less than $2 per million British thermal units, or MMBtu—which it had been for about 50 years—there was no way to make money building a $40 billion pipeline to carry it all the way from the North Slope of the Brooks Range in Alaska to Chicago, or Green Bay, Wisconsin, or Burnt Chitlin, Louisiana. Only in the past 10 years did the price climb above $3 per MMBtu, the lowest possible number at which an Alaskan pipeline might be feasible, according to experts in the natural-gas sector. (After spiking to more than $12 last summer, by February gas was down to about $4.75.)

Currently natural gas prices are at around 2.8 and the market is essentially saturated, which means there is NO demand for more natural gas pipelines.

That is just a lie they tell to the Alaskan men, much like "Yes I think back hair DOES make you look sexy."

Well I for one am tired of hearing this particular line of bullshit, and now that I hear how much this Boykin guy earned from sitting on his ass thinking up reasons to get paid, I am even MORE tired of it.