On Sept. 30, Trump announced that South Korea would invest $54 billion in AK LNG, equal to the high-end cost estimate that project developer Glenfarne has released to the public. This wasn’t true. On Oct. 6, he announced that Taiwan had agreed to invest $4.4 billion and buy 30% of AK LNG’s gas. This is at best premature and misleading, if not totally bogus.
Betting Alaska’s energy future on the Trump administration’s attempts to coerce a bad investment out of our allies is not just wrong. It’s a recipe for failure. We need better ideas than the 50-year-old financial black hole that has been AK LNG.
The art of the pretend deal
Last November, the U.S. and South Korea struck a deal: South Korea would invest $200 billion in American energy, mining, and technology projects in return for the United States capping tariffs on Korean goods at 15%. Prior to this, the Trump administration had put a 25% tariff on South Korea with its “Liberation Day” tariff order that April.
Alaska and the federal government (even under the Biden administration) have pushed South Korea and other Asian nations for years to invest in and contract gas from AK LNG. Even before the Nov. 2025 deal was signed, Korean trade officials were fighting misinformation from U.S. Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, who falsely claimed on social media that the deal would fund AK LNG. Governor Mike Dunleavy also immediately started spinning wild exaggerations about the agreement, asserting to the Korean press that their government would make a legally binding investment in AK LNG by December. But the specific projects South Korea would fund under the deal would be decided later. Korean businesses were reportedly relieved after the clarification.
In March 2026, South Korea’s legislative body, the National Assembly, passed a bill that set rules for deciding where its $200 billion would go. It included a process for vetting investments based on “commercial rationality,” a criterion AK LNG has been failing for half a century.
In September, South Korea decided to make one investment under the deal, backing a monstrous 6 gigawatt natural gas-fired power plant in Texas. It held off on investing in two others, pending an economic analysis: a series of eight U.S. nuclear power plants and AK LNG. That fact didn’t matter to President Trump, nor to Governor Dunleavy, Senator Dan Sullivan, and Rep. Nick Begich III, who all gathered for a late September announcement from the Oval Office, celebrating a deal that is far from done.
Two weeks later, Trump himself was in Alaska at a rally in Wasilla, where he called Commerce Secretary Lutnik to the stage to add a new misleading claim to the story of AK LNG progress in Asia. Back in March 2025, Taiwan’s state-run oil and gas company CPC signed a non-binding letter of intent to buy 6 million tonnes a year of gas from AK LNG – about 30% of AK LNG’s planned output of 20 million tonnes a year – as well as to invest an unspecified amount in the project. It was one of a number of noncommittal commitments that AK LNG collected that year from less-than-eager would-be partners in Asia. Like all these non-binding commitments, the one from Taiwan remains non-binding as of Oct. 15, well over a year later. Lutnik delivered old news with new hype. He “announced” that Taiwan had agreed to buy 30% of AK LNG’s gas and to invest up to $4.4 billion in the project. The specific amount of potential Taiwanese investment hadn’t been publicly disclosed, and might be the product of recent negotiations. An Oct. 14 statement from Taiwan’s Ministry of Economic Affairs affirmed only that Taiwan had signed the nonbinding letter of intent in March 2025, that $4.4 billion is the “estimated maximum investment” under discussion, and that “after nearly a year and a half of intensive negotiations and careful evaluation, the company has made significant progress with the US developer,” according to an AI translation. The long habit of AK LNG boosters inflating the significance of nonbinding agreements may have gotten louder, but not any smarter.
A bad deal remains bad
Asian gas-buyers have no good reason – apart from coercive pressure by the Trump administration – to be interested in AK LNG.
Reuters journalist Curtis Williams calculated that AK LNG — in terms of capital cost per unit of export capacity — would cost twice as much as LNG export projects in the Gulf of Mexico. But AK LNG’s sales pitch has always been less about price than about energy security, asking Asian buyers to pay more for gas with a short and unconstricted route across the Pacific (once an 800-mile pipeline brings it under tundra and mountain, that is). But in a world where imported energy is inherently volatile and solar and wind technology present strong alternatives, how much extra will Asian gas buyers be willing to pay for the supposed additional security of Alaskan gas? The evidence says “not that much.”
In the face of AK LNG’s astronomical (and still unknown) cost, investors and potential Asian buyers obviously see its proximity as a weak selling point. This was evident in 2022, when Senator Dan Sullivan presented it to Japanese trade officials,, accompanied by red-tinted pictures of dictators whom he said threatened Japan’s existing gas supply, at an ultimately fruitless summit in Tokyo. Now that Trump’s war with Iran has actually brought one of these “chokepoint” scenarios into existence, the continued reluctance of Asian gas buyers speaks even louder.
In any case, the LNG Canada terminal in British Columbia gives Asian buyers every advantage claimed by AK LNG with about half the pipeline miles. In late September, its lead developer Shell announced an expansion of the terminal’s export capacity from 14 million tonnes of LNG per year to 28 million tonnes, topping AK LNG’s planned output of 20 million tonnes per year. An additional 5.4 million tonnes per year of LNG export capacity has also reached final investment decisions and is under construction in British Columbia.
The LNG Canada terminal is a detriment to the climate and a local pollution disaster for its host community, Kitimat. But from the perspective of an Asian gas buyer, it’s a good reason not to put money into AK LNG. Not incidentally, Mitsubishi and the Korea Gas Corporation are partners.
A political and moral price tag
It has been clear for decades that commercial rationality is not on AK LNG’s side. But why should Alaskans be concerned by that? The party of free markets is perfectly willing to use threats instead. After South Korean officials quickly corrected his bogus announcement, reporters asked Trump the next day about the gap between his announcement and reality.
“If they don’t want to do it, that’s ok with me,” Trump said. “I’ll just charge them more… Wait, wait, they said they didn’t sign off? Tell them if they don’t sign shortly, I’m going to double it up, ok?”
This past year has seen plenty of discussion about AK LNG’s still-unknown financial price. Without an engineering study to back up their estimate, Glenfarne and AGDC say the project could cost $44 billion to $54 billion. Independent analysts think $70 billion is more likely. With cost overruns, it could be closer to $100 billion. Everyone who’s looked into AK LNG’s climate impacts knows the project comes with a moral price tag as well, measured in decades of locked-in dependence on fossil fuels that we ought to be rapidly displacing.
Under Trumpian diplomacy, AK LNG also comes with a geopolitical price tag for our nation. The Trump administration is pushing for it by abusing trust that the U.S. has built with Asia over decades. Security priorities – an existential urgency for the neighbor of North Korea – are being impacted by the Trump administration’s pressure for AK LNG.
Is coercing and exploiting American allies what it will actually take to overcome AK LNG’s economic illogic? In the unlikely event that Trump does bully AK LNG into existence at our allies’ expense, the price tag won’t be measured in mere tens of billions. It will also include the last vestiges of our nation’s international credibility as a trustworthy partner. That price is too high.