Bill Walker’s fifth campaign has become a Johnny-one-note issue: The gasline that never was

By SUZANNE DOWNING

June 28, 2026 – Former Gov. Bill Walker is running for governor for the fifth time, and if anyone has looked at his social media over the past several weeks, one thing is impossible to miss: Nearly every post is about the Alaska LNG project.

It’s the same message, over and over: Walker says he has the relationships. He says he has the experience. He says he is the one who can finish the gasline because he worked on it as governor.

His latest posts declare that “we brought the market to Alaska,” tout 15 memorandums of understanding, feature photos of him boarding Air Force One during the Trump administration, and argue that only he and running mate Randy Hoffbeck have the experience to “move it over the finish line.”

The campaign’s message is singular: Bill Walker equals the gasline.

There’s just one problem: When Walker actually had four years in office, there was no gasline.

Instead, the centerpiece of his strategy was a 2017 agreement with three communist Chinese state-owned entities: Sinopec, Bank of China, and China Investment Corporation. The arrangement envisioned the Chinese providing financing, engineering, construction, and purchasing most of the project’s LNG. It never became a binding commercial agreement and Gov. Mike Dunleavy cancelled it upon taking office. No communists would build the Alaska gasline.

The proposal had raised eyebrows because it depended on Chinese government-controlled companies financing strategic American energy infrastructure.

Even if commercial negotiations had progressed, any final transaction involving foreign ownership or control of critical U.S. infrastructure would almost certainly have faced review by the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States, the federal body that examines national security implications of foreign investments. Whether such a structure ultimately would have been approved can never be known because the project never reached that stage.

The larger point is that Walker’s China strategy never produced a financeable project. It wasn’t supported by Alaskans, either.

The 15 memorandums of understanding that Walker frequently cites were just that: MOUs.  They were expressions of interest rather than binding purchase or financing contracts. They did not produce a final investment decision, construction financing, or customers contractually committed to buying Alaska gas.

Compare that with where the project stands today.

The current Alaska LNG effort has moved toward private-sector development under Glenfarne, with agreements involving companies such as Baker Hughes and purchase commitments or letters of intent from Asian partners including POSCO. Those are the types of commercial relationships lenders typically expect to see before financing a multibillion-dollar energy project.

Walker’s campaign messaging leaves the impression that today’s progress is simply the continuation of his work. But between Walker’s Administration and the current project came years of restructuring, new commercial partners, a different ownership model, and a fundamentally different financing strategy.

His social media also tends to omit the rest of his gubernatorial record.

Walker signed Senate Bill 91, the sweeping criminal justice overhaul that became politically synonymous with “catch-and-release” policing as crime rates climbed. That law was later repealed after Gov. Mike Dunleavy took office.

Walker also became the governor most associated with reducing the Permanent Fund dividend by vetoing much of the statutory payout, touching off years of political battles that continue today.

Those issues receive little or no attention in his campaign. Instead, nearly every message returns to the gasline: Photos with President Trump to try to burnish his credentials. Photos with Gov. Wally Hickel. Photos from trade missions. No photos of him bowing to President Xi, however. But he makes plenty of claims that only Bill Walker knows how to finish the project.

For voters who are new to Alaska or who may not remember the Walker years the campaign presents a warped version of history centered almost exclusively on one unfinished project.

The irony is difficult to miss: Bill Walker’s fifth campaign is built around promising to complete the very project he was unable to deliver during the only four years he served as governor.

Alaskans will decide whether experience pursuing a project is enough, or whether results matter more than relationships, and how much of the state they want to give away to the Chinese government.

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