Senate Finance Committee: how do you analyze a $46.2 billion pipeline without the numbers?

That was the Alaska Senate Finance Committee's question Friday, as its leaders pressed for the commercial agreements, gas sales contracts, and cost inputs behind a proposed gas pipeline model before lawmakers consider any state role.

The demand came after weeks of hearings on Senate Bill 2001, a tax-break package now stalled over what senators describe as cost secrecy and missing financial detail. Earlier coverage framed the bill as a major tax-break debate in which lawmakers cannot assess the state's exposure or ratepayer impact without access to the developer's actual project economics.

Co-Chair Bert Stedman, a Sitka Republican, set the scene by recounting an earlier Alaska Gasline Development Corporation meeting as an "absolute meltdown" — the moment, he said, when state agencies realized no cash flow analysis had been done. "We concluded after that meeting that the Department of Revenue and Natural Resources on the state level needs to put together an integrated financial model," Stedman said. "You can't make good financial decisions without having the information."

The model itself isn't the issue, Stedman said. The data going into it is. "It is not the model that's the question or the operators of it. It's the inputs. Inputs and the lack of inputs where the discussion is, needs to be put on the table." Stedman and Co-Chair Lyman Hoffman, a Bethel Democrat, said they had met with the governor the previous day to ask for accurate inputs.

That request lands against the testimony of Department of Revenue Chief Economist Dan Stickel, who told the committee the current modeling uses a $46.2 billion construction cost senators have called speculative, and a gas-purchase price assumption ranging from $1.00 to $1.50 per thousand cubic feet.

"$1 to $1.50 is a huge spread," Stedman said. "And if they're as far off as they are on their construction cost as their gas price, that is a concern, to say the least, trying to use a model to make policy decisions."

Sen. Jesse Kiehl, a Juneau Democrat, took the question further, asking whether the Department of Revenue would even be allowed to see the underlying deal terms. "Will you be able to see all the way down into the corporate structures, all the way into the gas sales agreements, potential gas supply arrangements, the equity terms on which other investors are entering?" Kiehl asked. "Will the Department of Revenue be able to give us fully informed advice, or will you be modeling based on what we mostly think?"

Stickel's answer was short. "Senator Kiehl, through the Chair, I don't know."

Senators have tied the missing data directly to potential exposure for the state and Alaskan ratepayers. Sen. Bill Wielechowski, an Anchorage Democrat, said in earlier hearings that lawmakers have "no information about the cost of the project, no information about the cost of the gas" and "no idea what penalties the AGDC or the state might be exposed to if this goes forward or if it doesn't go forward exactly how they expected."

Hoffman added a closing thought of his own. "I would just submit that hope is not the ideal strategy when it comes to analyzing investments."

SB 2001 would replace certain state and municipal property taxes with an alternative volumetric tax. The committee adjourned before Stickel finished his presentation and is set to resume Monday at 10 a.m.