The Wall Street Journal question of the day asks:
 Should we approve the Keystone XL pipeline?  
Alaska Dispatch by Amanda Coyne.  Independent oil and gas analyst Pedro Van Meurs (NGP Photo) is no stranger to trying to help Alaska get its huge reserves of natural gas to market.  He’s been trekking north for about 15 years now. He’s worked for two governors and has sat through hours upon hours of legislative committees, listening to the seemingly endless partisan bickering over Alaska’s taxation policy. The pinnacle may have come in 2005-06, when then-Gov. Frank Murkowski, with Van Meurs’s help, introduced a plan to get Alaska gas to market that involved locking in oil taxes for up to 45 years.  Among the results of that push: a monumental federal investigation into Alaska political corruption and the ascension of Sarah Palin.  In short, Van Meurs has been a key player in one of the most tumultuous chapters in Alaska’s young history.  Despite all of that, Alaska’s vast natural gas reserves still remain buried under the Arctic tundra, thousands of miles from any market. And, according to Van Meurs, that’s where the gas likely will stay.

A dead duck?
Unless Alaska takes "extraordinary methods" — steps that Van Meurs doesn’t think Alaskans have "the stomach for" — the decades-old dream of a large diameter pipeline running from the state’s North Slope south to tidewater or into Canada is, in his words, "a dead duck."  He said this on Dec. 7 at a meeting of the Anchorage Chapter of the United States Association for Energy Economics, where Van Meurs gave a truncated version of a two-day legislative seminar he had earlier provided to Alaska lawmakers.  Van Meurs has much to say about Alaska’s tax scheme — namely that it needs to be revamped — best explained by Dermot Cole in the Fairbanks Daily News-Miner.   But his death-of-the-gasline pronouncement last Wednesday was perhaps the most dramatic point.  
He said the market in the Lower 48 will be flooded with shale gas. And before long, the Asian market, which Gov. Sean Parnell recently said Alaska should exploit, will be flooded with gas from Russia, Australia and Canada.  "I can’t believe that any country would be crazy enough," to commit to buy Alaska’s gas at the price it will need to make it to market through a large-diameter pipeline, Van Meurs said, adding that at least 15 other liquefied natural gas (LNG) projects were vying for Asian markets.  Unless Alaska taxpayers were willing to largely subsidize a line — or take other extraordinary methods — the state simply cannot compete with other markets, he said.