(Bloomberg) -- President Donald Trump on Tuesday touted his administration’s work on a proposed Alaska pipeline, underscoring his push to invigorate a long-stalled $44 billion project to transport natural gas across the state and export it overseas.
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The administration is “working on a gigantic natural gas pipeline in Alaska, among the largest in the world, where Japan, South Korea and other nations want to be our partner with investment of trillions of dollars each,” Trump said during his joint address to Congress.
“It will be truly spectacular. It’s all set to go. The permitting is gotten,” the president said.
Trump’s comments followed weeks of talks between US officials and Asian allies aimed at luring investments and agreements to buy gas from the Alaska liquefied natural gas venture. Although it’s been planned for decades, the project faces headwinds from its large price tag and mammoth scale, including the challenge of constructing an 800-mile (1,290 kilometers) pipeline across the state.
Trump pressed Japanese Prime Minister Shigeru Ishiba on the project during their meeting in February, winning his commitment to cooperate on strengthening energy security, “including increasing exports of United States liquefied natural gas to Japan in a mutually beneficial manner.” US officials, including Interior Secretary Doug Burgum and Energy Secretary Chris Wright, discussed the project in a meeting with Korean representatives last week.
The Philippines is planning to procure LNG from Alaska, and President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. intends to discuss the matter with Trump, the archipelago’s ambassador to the US, Jose Manuel Romualdez said last month on X.
Senator Dan Sullivan, a Republican from Alaska, said he’s interacted with Taiwan officials interested in the venture too.
There’s been “high-level engagement that is literally happening on a daily basis,” Sullivan said. “Things are aligning in a way that hasn’t happened before.”
The dollar figure Trump invoked before Congress on Tuesday is higher than any existing, formal pledges. For instance, Ishiba pledged to boost Japan’s overall investment in the US to $1 trillion but didn’t spell out a specific target for the Alaska venture. The country’s existing foreign direct investment in the US is already roughly the size of its annual budget.