Nobody took the $17.50

This summer, Enstar went looking for gas.

Not much by world standards. Three billion cubic feet, enough to carry Southcentral through a cold winter without rationing. Under contract the company pays about $8.78 per thousand cubic feet. To cover the gap, it offered $17.50 to anyone who would drill and produce new gas.

Nobody took it.

In a state sitting on roughly 35 trillion cubic feet of known gas on the North Slope, a utility doubled its price and still could not buy three billion cubic feet of it. Not at a premium. Not from anyone.

That tells you something important, and it's the opposite of what you'll hear from most people talking about your bill this month. This is not price gouging. It isn't a market failing to clear. When you double your offer and get no sellers, you have not found an expensive market. You have found an empty one.

What's happening under your floor

Almost everything on the Railbelt runs on Cook Inlet gas. Your heat, obviously. But also your lights, because the gas gets burned to make electricity too. Chugach runs about 80 percent of its power off it.

Cook Inlet has been producing for more than fifty years. Fields that old don't quit all at once, they taper, and ours has been tapering while demand didn't. Hilcorp has drilled 192 wells there since 2011, twenty-seven of them this year alone. That's a company working hard to slow a decline, which is a different job than growing supply.

So the system leans on storage. Going into a normal winter you want somewhere near seven billion cubic feet banked underground. After a cold spring drew it down, we were sitting closer to four as of late July.

A mild winter postpones this. It does not change it. If the weather comes in like last year, there isn't enough gas to do both jobs at once, and somebody has to choose between heat and power.

Somebody already wrote down the order

That choice isn't hypothetical. It's on paper.

If gas has to be curtailed, industrial users go first. Then businesses. Then, last, the buildings people are actually inside: churches, schools, hospitals, homes. Households are protected longest, which is the humane way to write the list. It's also the tell. We are now doing triage on heat in an energy state.

On the electric side, Matanuska Electric's CEO said something in July I don't think has fully landed: he cannot guarantee reliable power under normal operation, and he's never said that in his career. MEA is burning more diesel at Eklutna to compensate. If it gets bad, the tool is rolling thirty-minute blackouts, so the gas can go to heat instead. He put the earliest window at November.

The part that should make you angriest is also the hopeful part

I've seen the file. That's the part that's hard to explain to people who haven't: there is no engineering mystery in it and there never was. Nothing about this is geological. The gas that fixes it has been mapped for decades, sitting on the North Slope in quantities that would make most countries reorganize their foreign policy.

What's in the file is meetings.

What was never built is the connection between where the gas is and where Alaskans live.

That's it. That's the failure. Not a shortage of resources, a shortage of finished projects. Fifty years of studies, term sheets, working groups, and almost. Your utility bill is the invoice for all of it, and the invoice is now coming due with interest. Enstar's president has said customers could see costs rise by half in the near term, and roughly double by the 2030s if imported LNG ends up filling the hole.

The plan is a boat. Liquefied gas, bought somewhere else, carried across an ocean, unloaded in Cook Inlet at import prices, to heat houses built on top of one of the largest gas endowments on earth. Enstar has to file for that import facility by the end of this year. It isn't a warning about the future. It's a paperwork deadline in the present.

Somebody is going to stand on that dock and call it a solution.

Fairbanks is further down this road than the rest of us. Fairbanks went through roughly 60% increases in the cost of electricity last winter, and Golden Valley's backup plan involves burning about 300,000 gallons of diesel a day.

A build problem is the good kind of problem. Geology you cannot argue with. Physics you cannot vote out. But a thing that wasn't built can be built, and the only ingredient we've actually been short of is the will to finish something.

What I'd do

Stop treating energy as one issue among twenty. It isn't. It's the floor every other thing in this state stands on: every payroll, every school budget, every family doing the November math on whether they can afford another winter here. Get the gas moving to Alaskans first and price everything else off that. Quit relitigating the last fifty years of pipeline politics and finish the connection. And be honest with people about the intervening winters instead of promising a ribbon-cutting that solves a problem we have in ninety days.

MEA has already written the plan for turning your neighborhood's power off in thirty-minute increments, and presented it in public. They're doing that because it's responsible, and I don't fault them for it one bit. They're managing a problem they did not create.

But it's worth saying out loud what it means that they have to.

There is no reason on this earth we should be the ones rationing it.