ConocoPhillips is negotiating with potential buyers for the company's mothballed liquefied natural gas plant at Nikiski, on the Kenai Peninsula south of Anchorage, a company spokeswoman said Monday.
The plant, which has a capacity to manufacture up to 1.5 million mt/year of LNG, was built in 1968 by Phillips Petroleum and made regular shipments of LNG to Tokyo Gas and Tokyo Electric under long-term contracts until 2012, when the contracts expired.
Periodic shipments have been made to Japan and South Korea since then on a spot-sale basis, the last being in 2015.
ConocoPhillips put the plant up for sale in November and also recently sold the North Cook Inlet gas field, which supplies gas to the plant.
"We had requested that initial bids be submitted by March 17. The data room that was set up to market the Kenai LNG Facilities is closed and we have received interest," company spokeswomen Amy Jennings Burnett said in a statement.
"We are currently evaluating the bids to determine next steps. We believe the plant is a strategic asset that offers good opportunities for the right buyer," she said.
Although LNG prices in Asia are currently low the plant does provide a potential market for companies now exploring and developing new gas discoveries in Cook Inlet. The regional utility market is now supplied by contracts extending beyond 2025 and unless there is a way to market new gas, such as through LNG exports, future development may be stymied, state officials have said.
Phillips and Marathon Oil built the LNG plant in the 1960s as a way of marketing Cook Inlet gas discoveries that were stranded at the time. When exports began these were the world's first long-distance shipments of LNG and Japan's first imports of LNG.
