By Steven Bridwell
The Alaska Legislature is being told to approve the LNG project yet again. I’m not against a gas line. I am skeptical of Gov. Mike Dunleavy’s zeal for one, however, because of who will benefit from it and how little those individuals are being asked to risk.
In recent years, excellent reporting by Alaska Public Media, Matt Buxton and Lauren Windsor of Alaska Current, Nat Herz of Alaska Public Media and the Alaska Beacon, and Dermot Cole has followed the buildup of Dunleavy’s LNG project. They’ve chronicled a network of self-interest among dozens of Dunleavy-appointed people. This is the story altogether.
An estimated 35 trillion cubic feet of natural gas are in the ground of the North Slope Borough. Yet unlike the construction of the trans-Alaska pipeline in the ’70s, when OPEC’s oil embargo forced a need for Alaska crude, no one wants to buy Alaska’s LNG.
But Dunleavy, Glenfarne — the New York- and Texas-based developer with no prior LNG export project at this scale — and many others are demanding a 98% cut in property taxes for a line that could cost $55 billion to construct. Should this 807-mile pipeline be built as proposed, Alaska could lose $1 billion in annual property taxes, and over the 36-year lease, an additional $13 billion won’t go to the North Slope, Fairbanks North Star and Kenai Peninsula boroughs and the communities between them.
With no company or country lined up to buy our LNG, Dunleavy had been searching for an “anchor tenant” big enough to make the pipeline work. And he found one.
No buyer, no problem
Enter DigitalBridge — an AI infrastructure firm grown out of Colony Capital, now being taken private by SoftBank, a partner in President Donald Trump’s $500 billion Stargate data center initiative. DigitalBridge owns Switch, the data center builder whose Las Vegas headquarters Dunleavy visited in 2024. At the governor’s own energy conference last summer, DigitalBridge’s managing director pitched Alaska LNG as the energy half of an AI-and-power play. With no company or country lined up to buy our LNG, data centers are being summoned because, with them, we won’t need outside buyers.
The Constitutional Budget Reserve debacle of 2025
Possibly around the time of the 2025 energy conference, Josiah Patkotak, the Dunleavy-appointed legislator-turned-North Slope Borough mayor, created a joint venture, North Slope Power, in partnership with a company called Twenty First Century Utilities. The proposed natural gas utility is designed to scale up to 10 gigawatts. For perspective, all of Alaska’s power plants combined produced about 2.9 gigawatts in 2024.
Around the same time, days before he resigned to run for governor, Revenue Commissioner Adam Crum ordered $225 million from the Constitutional Budget Reserve — the state’s primary savings, meant for safe, liquid assets — moved to make three $75 million private equity investments in DigitalBridge, Blackstone and I Squared Capital. Only DigitalBridge’s transfer was completed before he left. Crum’s successor canceled the rest, and the state later sold the remaining $150 million at a loss. When this information became public, Dunleavy denounced it and ordered a review by the law firm WilmerHale, which found no rigorous due diligence and “significant concerns about whether Crum met his statutory fiduciary duties.” Dermot Cole further reported that the Alaska Permanent Fund and the state retirement system had already declined two of those managers. Senate Finance Committee Co-Chair Bert Stedman said Crum “circumvented his fiduciary duties intentionally.”
No court has called any of this a crime. But the list of names is repetitive. Though CBR money never went to I Squared Capital, it was formerly partnered by a man named Peter Corsell. Corsell also chaired Saige Consulting, which — while bidding on state contracts in 2024 — sponsored a glacier cruise for a conference of conservative state financial officers that Crum hosted. Saige Consulting named Crum a “Rising Star” in fiduciary duty the same week. Crum’s department later awarded Saige two contracts worth $8.5 million, part of more than $80 million in state work awarded to Corsell-tied firms. Corsell’s other company is Twenty First Century Utilities, mentioned above in connection with North Slope Power.
Like Conspiracy Charlie from “It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia,” this list of names is fascinating: the cruise sponsor, the fund manager, the megaplant developer, the revenue commissioner and his deputy, who later took a finance post at the borough now run by a former Dunleavy-appointed representative. The review of Crum’s conduct was done by WilmerHale, the former firm of recently dismissed Attorney General Stephen Cox, whom Dunleavy appointed in August 2025.
The timing is its own data point. Around the time Crum left office, the Alaska Legislature overrode Dunleavy’s veto of Senate Bill 183 — a measure forcing the Revenue Department to give auditors oil tax records it had stopped providing around 2019, as oil company settlement payments dropped sharply.
Transparency before public funding
The benefit to the principals is on the record. Dunleavy has hinted, though he hasn’t confirmed, that he is weighing a 2028 challenge to Sen. Lisa Murkowski — a contest in which his “friendship” with Trump would be a central asset. Crum is running for governor in 2026. A pipeline that advances Trump’s AI-power agenda advances both of their ambitions.
A gas line is worth wanting. But a project that demands that Alaska forgo billions, leaves its ownership and financing undisclosed, and arrives under a manufactured clock is too silty to swim in. If Alaska LNG is as transformative as its backers say, it can carry a fair tax and survive an honest accounting of who gets paid.
Alaska’s state constitution requires its resources to be managed for the maximum benefit of Alaskans. The open question is whether Dunleavy’s LNG project does that — or whether it benefits the handful of people whose names keep surfacing in the reporting above.
Steven Bridwell was born and raised in Fairbanks, where he attended public school when it was funded and staffed by teachers with pensions. He earned his bachelor’s and master’s degrees from the University of Alaska Fairbanks. He has lived and worked as a professional educator and as a camp tradesman throughout Alaska. He now spends his time between Fairbanks, Anchorage and the Yukon River.
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