by Abby Schultz -
Jun 29th, 2009 
Where the natural gas from the Alaska Natural Gas Pipeline will end up is a murky question tied up in a 30-year-old treaty, expansion of Canadian tar sands operations, and trends in natural gas supplies both in the United States and in Canada.
Environmentalists fear at least half of the relatively clean-burning Alaskan North Slope gas will end up fueling tar sands operations in Alberta, where the pipeline will end, instead of coming to the lower 48 states to replace carbon-intensive coal in power plants. The tar sands operations already consume about 20 percent of Canada’s natural gas, and they are expected to need as much as twice that by 2035.
Michael Brune of the Rainforest Action Network calls the pipeline "a stealth dirty oil mega-project … conceived by Big Oil.”
“Under Plan Palin, ExxonMobil and TransCanada would construct a 1700-mile natural gas pipeline from the Arctic, heading south,” Brune writes. “About half of it is likely to be siphoned to help produce the dirtiest oil on earth.”
It might not be that simple, though.
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