Fairbanks Daily News-Miner

Could it be that Republican Rep. Ralph Samuels of Anchorage was right? Rep. Samuels last year was the only member of the House to — heaven forbid! — vote against the gas line legislation of the state’s new and, at the time, highly popular governor.

Rep. Samuels worried the state would have just one applicant from which to choose. The Anchorage Republican is considered one of the Legislature’s more knowledgeable members on matters of oil and gas.

Eight months later, Alaska indeed has just one.

The application by TransCanada was deemed by the governor’s team as being the only one to comply with terms of the governor’s Alaska Gasline Inducement Act.

So now Gov. Palin finds herself trying to be optimistic in a situation that doesn’t appear all that promising. The Alaska gas line act, an act that is unmistakably hers in success or failure, has produced a pipeline applicant who says Gov. Palin must do something she has so far been loath to do. She must, TransCanada says in its proposal, negotiate with executives of ConocoPhillips, Exxon Mobil and BP, the three major leaseholders of North Slope natural gas, to get those companies to commit the gas to the pipeline.

But directly negotiating a pipeline fiscal regime with the oil companies would equate Gov. Palin with former Gov. Frank Murkowski, something Gov. Palin surely is trying to avoid. She has repeatedly, during her gubernatorial campaign and since taking office, maligned Gov. Murkowski’s approach.

Gov. Murkowski, though, recognized from the outset that a pipeline won’t get built unless the major oil companies believe the long-term economics justify the commitment of the gas to the pipeline. It is the commitment of that gas that is necessary in order for financing to be obtained to build the pipeline.

Gov. Palin has for a long time sought to bypass the oil companies, however. The Palin plan is to create a situation in which a pipeline would be authorized by the federal government or perhaps built by a third party, thereby creating internal and external pressure on the companies to agree to release the gas into the pipeline. The companies, however, will likely only succumb to the forces of economics, not of public relations. It can be no other way on a project of this magnitude.

The Legislature does share some of the responsibility for problems in the pipeline effort, having given overwhelming approval to Gov. Palin’s gas line legislation. But the Legislature appears to have caught on to the idea that maybe the governor’s approach isn’t the best.

Senators and representatives should look for their own way of hastening construction of the gas pipeline. They can save Alaska critical time by not only reviewing the ConocoPhillips proposal, as they are now doing, but also by seeking to determine sooner rather than later whether the TransCanada proposal is a viable proposal.

They will be acting in the state’s best interest if they do so.

The Palin plan is based on hope and on stubbornnness. Stubborness can be a beneficial trait in a governor, but Alaska doesn’t need such a characteristic in its leader right now. The state risks losing years through Gov. Palin’s approach. And those are years the state can ill afford as it seeks to make the transition to an economy based on the development of natural gas rather than oil, whose once-plentiful pools are fading. We can see a life without oil and without natural gas, and it isn’t a good one.

Perhaps it’s time for the governor to heed the very words of Albert Einstein that her team attached to an written overview of ConocoPhillips’ gas pipeline proposal, a proposal the governor has rejected as not complying with her Alaska Gasline Inducement Act. The administration says the company’s proposal was reminiscent of the approach taken by Gov. Murkowski, Gov. Palin’s predecessor.

Atop the written overview, given to the Senate Resources Committee, was quote of Einstein: “Insanity: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.”