A leaked plan to fire Alaska's gas-line developer surfaces in Juneau

A confidential state document describing how Alaska could remove Glenfarne as the lead developer of its $44 billion gas-line project has leaked — and on Friday, the awkward business of that leak spilled into open legislative session, with state and company officials forced to address it side by side.

The Alaska Gasline Development Corporation didn't dance around it. "I think everyone knows what I'm talking about with respect to a stolen AGDC document, confidential document," Commercial Director Matt Kissinger told the HB 381 conference committee, calling the leak theft. The draft, he said, laid out a "paid clawback" — a mechanism letting the state buy Glenfarne out and take over if the developer misses its construction milestones, as opposed to simply walking away with nothing changing hands. Kissinger noted he'd actually described that clawback concept publicly more than a year ago, in April 2025 testimony.

What makes the leak sensitive isn't the concept, then — it's everything around it. AGDC President Frank Richards said the draft was prepared for the agency's board during negotiations and contains "commercially sensitive information about other parties," including details about the other companies AGDC weighed before picking Glenfarne to lead the project. Releasing it raw, he warned, could breach confidentiality agreements with those firms. Sen. Bert Stedman suggested AGDC just redact and release a version, given how far it's already traveled — but Kissinger said the agency can't, because it doesn't even have its own copy. "If you would be willing to provide us with a copy of that document, then we can consider redacting it," he told Stedman. As of Friday, AGDC had only been able to look at the leaked version of its own document.

Glenfarne, for its part, took the high road in public — while making clear the leak stung. President Adam Prestidge said the company is still committed to building the project, and offered a notable concession: in any future buyout, Glenfarne won't try to claim added value from the very tax breaks the Legislature is debating. "We would not ask for any numerical value to be assigned based on the implementation of a tax arrangement," he said.

But he didn't hide the deeper worry. The leak, Prestidge said, "creates a little bit of a hesitation around how we will be able to trust certain confidentiality protections" — and the audience for that worry isn't just Juneau. Asian gas buyers, investors, and the federal government, he noted, are tracking the committee's work daily. On a project that lives or dies on whether outside partners believe Alaska can keep a secret, a leaked plan to fire the lead developer is exactly the wrong signal at exactly the wrong moment.