Mary Vought: Alaska is gambling with a pipeline that would change everything for families

By MARY VOUGHT

June 25, 2026 – After 50 years of waiting, Alaska finally had a private company willing to build its natural gas pipeline. Glenfarne came forward with a real commitment. This year, for the first time, the pieces were genuinely in place. Then the state Senate came close to ending it in one night. This is how Alaska’s biggest opportunities tend to die.

House Bill 381 was the vehicle for making it happen. It was a narrowly focused piece of legislation designed to address a property tax structure that would have buried the project in costs before it produced a dollar of revenue. The House grasped the stakes. 34 members voted for a clean bill with broad bipartisan support and sent it to the Senate. The Senate’s response was to load that bill with a new corporate income tax that Glenfarne says will end the project.

The Alaska Landmine, which has covered this fight as closely as any outlet in the state and done terrific work, made the case early that the greatest risk to this project “has always been clear: the Alaska State Legislature.” The Senate just proved the point.

Glenfarne, which has invested years and significant capital in this project, issued a statement after the Senate vote, making clear the project could not be financed or built under those conditions. Alaska has no second option and no other developer waiting to step in. That is not a negotiating position. That is a warning.

The income tax the Senate added specifically targets S corporations, which are privately held companies, in a single industry. The IRS has no framework for this. That means the Alaska Department of Revenue would be writing rules from scratch while investors in a $44 to $55 billion project wait for certainty that may never come. Alaska would be charting legal territory that does not exist anywhere else and asking private capital to follow. No other state has ever singled out one industry and applied a targeted entity-level income tax to its S corporations. Alaska would be doing something that has never been done anywhere in American law.

This does not stop with Glenfarne. The provision sets a dangerous precedent. The language could be expanded to apply to any pass-through business in Alaska by changing only a few words. The framework would be in place, and a new income tax could be implemented on a doctor’s office in Anchorage or a bakery in Fairbanks at a moment’s notice. Alaskans should see this for what it is: an attack on Alaskan entrepreneurs.

Cook Inlet gas, which heats homes across Southcentral Alaska, is declining and getting more expensive by the year. Families in Anchorage and the Matanuska-Susitna Valley are already watching their utility bills climb. A pipeline at full capacity could cut what Southcentral families pay for gas by half. For a family trying to get through an Alaska winter, that is not a policy footnote. It is the difference between getting through the month and not.

The senators who attached this tax to HB 381 would say they were protecting Alaska’s fiscal interests. What they were doing was betting the project. A lower tax on a pipeline that gets built generates real revenue, jobs, and affordable energy for Alaskans. A higher tax on one that never gets built generates nothing. Glenfarne was not posturing when they said the deal cannot close under these terms. This is a company that has to take a financing package from lenders. When they say the terms are unworkable, they mean it.

Strip the income tax provisions from the bill entirely. Restore the framework that the House passed with such strong support. Give Glenfarne the terms it can actually take to its financing partners. Alaska families have waited more than half a century for affordable energy and the economic future this pipeline would deliver. They should not have to keep waiting because their senators chose a political fight over a project that would actually work.

Mary Vought, a former senior Senate advisor, is an Alaskan currently residing in Washington, D.C.