I can’t believe that the Washington Post allowed its writer to indulge in all of the stereotypical hyperbole about the frozen north, un- touched wilderness and pristine and frozen Arctic in the recent article about the northern gas line proposals.
The wilderness aspects may apply to the McKenzie River line, but is certainly not true of the Alaskan project. The Alaska gas line would parallel the Alaska Highway: To continue to pretend this is remote wilderness is naïve. Most projections have shown that it will not be nearly the large project that the original Alyeska oil pipeline was thirty years ago. The problem as Alaskans see it is that it won’t create enough jobs. Alaska now has the infrastructure as well as a larger population which it did not have back then. The oil pipeline took three years because they had to build the road.
Still, many in Alaska including Former Governor Walter Hickle and Fairbanks Borough Mayor Jim Whittaker favor an all Alaska route that would follow the oil pipeline to Valdez, where a liquefaction plant would transfer the product to tankers.
Why Murkowski continues his abysmally slow negotiations with big oil while ignoring the all Alaska route is the big mystery in Alaska right now. Many Alaskans believe that the big oil companies have no intention of building the gas line,: after all, they have had the opportunity to build a gas line for thirty years, but seem to prefer to use their money to construct gas projects in Indonesia and far eastern Russia.

A 'Great Pipeline Race' in Canada: "Soaring energy prices and profits have revived plans for two massive pipelines -- the biggest private construction projects in North America -- to bring natural gas hundreds of miles south from the frozen Arctic Ocean, through vast untouched forests and under wild rivers, to the United States.
The plans would flood isolated areas of Alaska and Canada with thousands of construction workers, pump billions of dollars into poor native economies, and bring the roar of heavy cranes and bulldozers to pristine areas where it is now quiet enough to hear the hoots of snowy owls and the rustle of pine boughs"