Chapter 16. Events Collectives. The Social Life of a Promise-Disappointment Cycle

At a meeting I attended in 2004, Alaska governor Frank Murkowski invited oil executives and members of his staff to discuss plans for building a $30 billion natural gas pipeline. One of the participants, Joe Marushak, a vice president for ConocoPhillips, stated, “What we see happening over and over again is that Alaska [oil companies] come together to start working on a pipeline project when natural gas prices get quite high. And then, gas prices get as low as $2.25 [per thousand cubic feet]. Well, that $2.25 clearly does not support a pipeline, and just highlights—for whatever reason—periods where there’s huge price volatility. That volatility puts a dampening eff ect in trying to invest thirty billion dollars at one point in time.” Also in attendance at the meeting was Terry Koonce, then president of ExxonMobil, who expressed his own ambivalence about the project: “Governor, we love you,” Koonce began, “but we have to make sure that we don’t develop in my own terms a sinkhole or a problem for the next generation of management or shareholders coming behind us.” The discovery in the 1960s of a large natural gas reservoir located at Prudhoe Bay has inspired frequent exchanges between Alaska state offi cials (including at one time myself as associate director of energy under Governor Murkowski, primarily working with Congress on energy issues) and industry sponsors about the delivery of Alaska gas to southern markets. For oil executives, the sizable reward for monetizing Alaska gas and its extraordinary positioning in relation to energy markets links two elements of one chain: fi rst, the uncertainty of delivering Alaska gas to markets located thousands of miles away, and second, addressing this uncertainty