Interior’s Burgum Floats Shipping Gas From Alaska North Slope

By Ari Natter and Ruth Liao

Oct 24, 2025 (Bloomberg) –US Secretary of the Interior Doug Burgum floated the concept of storing natural gas produced in Alaska’s North Slope and shipping it directly from there, a proposal he said has drawn interest from unnamed foreign investors.

“It could be a second project, just tapping into that gas field and figuring out a way to move it out by ship,” Burgum said Friday during remarks at an event held by the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies, a Washington nonpartisan research institute.

Shipping the gas would require the fuel to first be liquefied through an export facility, which requires billions of dollars to build. Icy North Slope conditions would most likely make it difficult to construct an export plant there, though Burgum said there are months at a time when there is a path through the ice.

The planned Alaska LNG project currently under development includes a new pipeline about 800 miles (1,288 kilometers) long that would deliver the gas from the North Slope to an export facility in Nikiski, Alaska, as well as the residential area of Anchorage, which is facing a decline in domestic gas. The plant would have a capacity of 20 million metric tons per year.

Developer Glenfarne Group is leading the Alaska LNG project. A spokesperson for Glenfarne did not immediately respond for requests for comment on the possibility of shipping gas from the North Slope directly. 

The long-proposed Alaska LNG project has been pitched for decades and revived under the Trump administration. The state of Alaska has a stake in the current project along with Glenfarne, through the Alaska Gasline Development Corp.

Burgum last told reporters this week that the front-end engineering and design study for the project, including the pipeline, was still underway and could be finished by December. A formal decision to move forward with Alaska LNG has not yet been made.

© 2025 Bloomberg L.P.

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