2026 Alaska Sustainable Energy Conference Thursday keynote

International operations. Aspect Holdings, the parent of Epic Oil and Gas LLC, was the successful bidder on 8 blocks covering 110,000 acres in the recent Bureau of Land Management oil and gas lease offering in the National Petroleum Reserve in Alaska. Jim will give an overview of Aspect, its global successes, and its commitment to community. Please join me in welcoming Jim for this morning's opening keynote. Decades of global exploration success behind it, Aspect enters Alaska's North Slope.

The United States definitely did not overpay for Alaska. I'm pretty sure of that. This is extraordinary. I'm kind of awed by this conference. I really didn't know about it.

We're new to Alaska. The governor— governor, you're here somewhere— commissioners, representatives of all the agencies and companies that are investing in Alaska. This is just amazing and big. I've been at big conferences like CIRA, and this competes incredibly well. So I am Jim Piccone, Chief Legal Officer of Aspect Holdings.

Here in Alaska, we call ourselves EPOC, and I'll tell you a little bit about that in a second. But let me first say thank you to the organizers for inviting me to speak and tell you a little bit about Aspect. And I also want to introduce Jim Thorson. Jim, stand up. Jim is responsible for sort of our technical knowledge of Alaska and in particular the North Slope and helped guide us in the bidding for for these blocks that were mentioned.

So thank you, Jim. And Jim and I and a couple of other folks are the Alaska team. And we're really excited to be here. You know, I wasn't sure at first that oil and gas exploration fit in this conference. I looked at the presentations and I thought, well, renewables and nuclear and everything but us.

But I quickly found out that this conference is immersed in oil and gas exploration and production. That's what keeps the wheels on, keeps the engine turning, and helps all these other projects move ahead and helps the communities thrive. So totally impressed. So my purpose here this morning is to tell you a little bit about ASPECT. Our name says it all, Epoch.

We named it that because we think Alaska is entering a new golden age. An epoch. And it's pretty obvious from this conference that's exactly what's going on. So ASPECT was founded— let me see, our slides are— next slide? I do it.

Okay.

ASPECT was founded by Alex Cranberg in 1992. I've actually been with Alex on and off in many different roles, outside counsel, I've been general counsel twice, I was a partner in a company that was partners with Aspect. I've always admired his innovative approach. He kind of flies a little bit under the radar, but he wasn't flying under the radar when President Trump had the 16 oil executives into the White House a few weeks ago, I guess back in January, talking about Venezuela. Alex was one of the 16 executives invited by the President and the Secretary of Energy.

And he was the one Trump wanted to talk to the most because he described himself as a wildcatter, and that's what we are. Over the years, Aspect has invested $2 billion in oil and gas exploration, drilled 600 wells, and discovered 600 million barrels of oil equivalent. It's been pretty extraordinary. What makes— and let me just say that we've returned I think it's on this slide. It's returned 11 times our investors' money and for a 25% internal rate of return to our investors from day one, from 1992 forward.

So it's been incredibly successful. What makes that success? Two things that are actually so key to this Alaska experience. One is over these decades, Alex and his team have developed a proprietary in-house processing system and exploration analysis that is world-class. We have found oil and gas in places that others have just passed by or thought it was unattainable.

We found the first oil in Belize. We discovered 5 new fields in Hungary when the state-owned companies in Hungary believed that there was nothing left to find in Hungary. We recently found 4 discoveries in a row in Croatia so big that they're going to supply one half of Croatia's domestic gas supplies once developed. So it's just an incredible machine, a tool that just keeps getting better all the time, especially with AI now. Second, we're nimble.

Really, Aspect is not only founded by but run by our genius founder, Alex. And, you know, he's in touch every day, although he's technically the chairman and a little bit removed, having moved to Florida. I swear he spends more time on the phone than most of us do, and we're constantly reviewing potential around the world, we probably looked at 50 countries, seriously. I mean, right now we're looking at, besides the countries I'm going to show you in just a second, probably 10 countries including Venezuela. So it's— he just looks for where the hydrocarbons are and where they can be found with proprietary seismic unique engineering.

So next I'm going to show you the block— or the— this is just a picture of the areas around the world that we found major discoveries. We found other— there's discoveries in other places, but these are kind of the major countries. I know it's kind of hard to see on this slide, but, you know, we talk about Croatia there, we talk about Hungary, those are the most important recent areas. In Hungary, we're producing half of that country's domestic oil right now, oil and gas.

As I said, in Croatia, we're going to be producing half of that country's natural gas, so it's an amazing company.

Next, just to give you a quick picture of where the blocks that we were the high bidder on, don't have the leases yet, but We understand they're in the mail and all we have to do is sign them and send them back, except for one, the one up by the lake, Teshupukh, where, you know, that's obviously in some kind of hold at the present time. But 7 other blocks that you can see here, we call One Draco, way off to the west, that's going to be a challenge. But we're right there with our neighbor, Bill Armstrong, and we're, you know, from day one we've been talking to Bill once he found out that His good friend Alex Kranberg was his neighbor in that area. We've had weekly conversations at the high level, Alex and Bill, and at the team level. We've been at Bill's office in Denver and they've been over at our office and we've been talking about how we approach this development.

In Andromeda, we're surrounded by some really big players. We're not going to drive that particular development probably as little guys. At least at present, we're little guys. But those are the areas we'll work on first. And Cygnus is the area up by the lake, which, you know, we hope we can develop responsibly and in complete cooperation with the group that's called NTI.

Talking to them, talking to BLM, we'll just work that out responsibly. And I'm going to tell you a story about responsible development here in just a second.

Here's what we think about Alaska. As I said, we think it's entering a golden age. This North Slope is just an amazing asset. We believe there's some 20 billion barrels of recoverable oil in the remaining part of the North Slope. We actually think the number is bigger than that.

We're trying to be a little bit conservative here. The north slope holds more than 30 shelf-edge delta systems. They're just like what we see at Pika and Willow, and they just keep repeating themselves as you go to the west. And they're all clean and repeatable and totally analogous. It's exciting for a geophysicist.

I know when Jim talks about it, he gets a little— Jim, yeah. He gets a little crazy.

So the conventional play in the North Slope is like a perfect match for our proprietary seismic. We're excited to put it to work there, and we think it's going to be highly successful.

This is what it means for Alaska, just our quick internal analysis. You know the 50% of the federal— all the federal revenue goes to the state to split among various levels. But in addition to that, of course, there's property taxation by the North Borough. There's all kinds of development of businesses and employment. And when you put that all together, we think there's going to be, in present value terms, potential for $100 billion of revenue wealth to the state of Alaska.

So I'm going to tell you a little bit about some of our history of— you know, the word sustainability is big and broad. It's been part of our ethos since the very beginning. When we went to Belize, we were drilling for oil in deep, hot, thick jungles with with extreme environmental issues and care. But one of the things we did was prepared a program for the local children in the villages who are really suffering from, you know, education that just wasn't happening. So we built solar-powered satellite receivers in all of these villages and promoted a remote learning system that brought these children from the worst test scores in the country to the highest.

And we supported that effort for 15 years and just 2 years ago gave it back to the— or gave it over to the community that we were in. And we had been out of Belize for a long time, but we were sustaining this program and leaving our mark on the community by giving them— this new program that was just a tremendous asset for the community.

So that's a little bit about ASPECT. I don't need to bore you with the leadership team. Alex is pictured at the top, but it's probably hard for you to see that. You know, this renewed interest in Alaska coincides with world events. Coincidentally, that are warning the world once again that reliance on foreign energy, energy that's out of our control in the United States, is really dangerous.

Being dependent on countries that may have interests that are completely misaligned with ours is kind of what's happening now, and it's a real problem. And Alaska is part of the United States and the world's answer to that. The resources here are rich. And we hope to be a part of that. The geopolitical case for Alaska oil development has never been stronger and aligns perfectly with what we do at Aspect.

It's, you know, it's going to be a diversified, resilient American energy future here. Just close with something personal about Aspect and really Alex Cranberg, who's the personality of Aspect. And as I said, I've known him for all virtually my entire professional career. You know, I've watched the energy industry, you know, have booms and busts over and over again since the early 1980s. And one of the things that's clear is those companies that survive are companies that build something.

They're the ones that don't just see a resource, but they build something and they leave something like we did in Belize. We see our activity in, in any country or any place where we operate as a responsibility, not just an opportunity. Uh, Alec Cranberg built Aspect with that ethos. It's not just what can we extract, but what can we build? What can we build for investors, for the communities, for the state, for the nation?

So for us, the North Slope is calling. And as you've heard before, the phrase, we're with it. ASPECT is going north to the future with ASPECT, without Alaska, and we intend to do it right. Thank you very much.

Tá.

Thanks very much, Jim. Please give him a big round of applause.

Welcome to Alaska. Our next presentation highlights a project that represents both innovation and industrial resilience. In the Arctic and one that is redefining what's possible for energy and manufacturing on Alaska's North Slope. I can't help but be proud. Aly Eskim is one of ADA's investments, and I remember when J.R. first came to us, and so we're very excited to see all that they are doing.

But Aly Eskim, Made on the North Slope for the North Slope, explores how Arctic-focused innovation is helping address the unique challenges of climate-scale logistics operating environments in the world. By adapting existing technologies and industrial processes for Arctic conditions, Alyeskim is advancing the production of methanol and ultra-low sulfur diesel directly from the North Slope natural gas, producing two of the region's most critical imported commodities locally on the North Slope itself. It's one of those ideas that I keep thinking, why didn't we think of that before? But we're excited to have it now. The project is designed to strengthen reliability, resilience, and long-term support for Alaska's energy industry.

And just this month, Alyeskim celebrated the groundbreaking of the first petrochemical plant in the U.S. Arctic. J.R. Wilcox is the CEO of Alyeskim, which he founded in 2015. He holds a BS in chemistry and an MS in environmental chemistry from the University of Alaska Fairbanks. Those are two degrees I will never hold. He began his career as an environmental scientist working primarily in the energy industry, and he co-founded Cook Inlet Energy in 2009 and has since become a serial entrepreneur.

Please join me in welcoming J.R. Wilcox for today's presentation.

Thank you very much, Julie, and thank you very much to— yeah, you're not just the intro, but your support through your role on the ADA Board for helping make this project possible.

Let's see here. This— may as well let you see an image of what the plant is supposed to look like there. This is a rendering of what it will look like when it's done. As Commissioner Sandy noted, we just did our groundbreaking. So I've got a few pictures of that at the end.

So we actually have steel going in the ground now. This— it took about 11 years from the point when I was like, oh, this would be a neat idea, to the point where we're actually getting to make it happen. So as she said, Alyeskim is a company founded on building a chemical plant on the North Slope, which may be the beginning of, you know, a larger petrochemical industry and the ability to add value to Alaska's natural gas. But before I get started, I would like to thank everybody for coming today. I would like to thank all the people that make this conference possible.

It really is amazing. I know Andrew Jensen put a lot of work into this. The Toast of the Town team has done a fantastic job putting this on. The staff of the Dena'ina Center. It takes a lot of people in order to make something like this come together, and they've done a great job again.

This is, yeah, 5th year for this conference. I know some of you have been here here all 5 times. Some of you, it's your first time. To those of you visiting from outside, welcome to Alaska. I hope you come back lots of times.

And I'd really like to give a lot of special credit to Governor Dunleavy, who has just made this a passion project and helped to get this conference going. I hope this continues through many administrations in the future, because it's hard to assign an economic value to an event like this, but it's huge. Every project gets better from taking government, industry, academia, lots of different sectors and having people cross-pollinate and figure out how to do projects collaboratively.

This is really, you know, this is what our plant should look like. This is what civil society should look like. So, you know, a round of applause to everybody here and to the governor.

So the basic vision of Alyeskim is you look at Alaska's North Slope, and you know, I think if you went back in time, there was a point where we sort of approached this as a boom. We were going to put some infrastructure in, it was going to run for a certain number of years, and then we were going to roll it up and we were going to go home. And I think as time has gone by, you know, I was born in 1977, which is the same year that we started the pipeline flowing. I think we've sort of settled in to understand that the North Slope of Alaska is a true truly a unique geologic opportunity. And if 200 years from now we're not burning fossil fuels anymore, we're probably going to be doing something else with them.

The North Slope is not going away as an energy basin. So how do we kind of settle in and operate it for the long term in a smart way? And part of that is being able to do things with the molecules that add value to them. So chemistry, really unlocks a lot of opportunities. We believe at Alieschem that that's the key to raising the efficiency, reducing operating costs, monetizing gas, unlocking additional resources, and adding value to the resources that we have.

So the first thing that we're doing is building a small chemical plant right in the middle of Prudhoe Bay to produce methanol and ultra-low sulfur diesel. Which are the top two things that get imported to the North Slope. And I know everybody is probably familiar with what diesel is. Fewer people know what methanol is, but the long story short is that it's an alcohol. You shouldn't drink it.

It mixes with water. It mixes with oil. It freezes at a very low temperature, and it's indispensable for operating Arctic oil operations.

This is the essential problem. So we've got— here's a map. You can see what's been happening to methanol supply supply chains for 50 years. We've been operating in the Arctic. We've used methanol.

It's one of the simplest things you can make out of natural gas. We have gas on the North Slope and we've been bringing it in for thousands and thousands of miles from Trinidad, from Brunei. Currently it's coming from the US Gulf Coast, but it's, it's come from all over and it has to be brought thousands of miles into Anchorage, then railed to Fairbanks, and then trucked to the North Slope. So this was not the best way to do things and we're, you know, changing that. Alaska has— of course we're growing to the east and west.

There's that core area around Prudhoe Bay. Currently we believe there's about— we're sizing this plant to meet the existing methanol demand. The ultra-low sulfur diesel, we're being able to take the the high sulfur diesel that's being able to be produced on the North Slope in its topping units but wasn't able to be burned in engines, to be able to apply hydrogen to that in order to make it into the ultra-low sulfur diesel that can be used in engines. And the demand for that is increasing strongly. I believe it's about doubling over the course of a decade on the baseload.

So we're not going to be able to replace all of the imported diesel to the North Slope, but we're taking a good chunk out of it and should be able to make the area self-sufficient for current methanol demand.

This is our project site. If you're familiar with the North Slope, that's Flow Station 3 at the top. That's the Spine Road at the bottom. We're about a mile inside the west security gate. If you're not familiar with the North Slope, Prudhoe Bay is really at the epicenter of everything.

We're right smack in the middle of Prudhoe Bay, close to where the Trans-Alaska Pipeline begins. So we believe this is a unique site. It does take— it is a complicated land situation in Alaska. You can't just go to MLS and buy yourself a site and build a plant on it. It was a long relationship that we had to move through with the state of Alaska in order to get this pad, which was originally built to serve a Spectrum LNG project.

I think Ray is around here, who was instrumental in that. That was originally built by ADA for a previous project. So ADA really has touched this, the development of this a number of times. And we're directly next to the main pipeline corridor, which you can kind of see moving through the middle of that satellite image. That's carrying field fuel gas, gas for injection, produced water, 3-phase produced fluids, sales quality crude.

This is, this is right where you would want to build a value-added industrial center. And you can see why we got the 2 different colors on that pad. That's because we sold the left half of our pad to Harvest LNG to enable the construction of LNG that could be trucked to Fairbanks while we built our plant on the east side of the pad.

This is just another, another view of the pad. This is of course before we got busy groundbreaking. You can see this is after Harvest had built their LNG plant there in the yellow area, and we're in the red area. So this is kind of looking from from the north to the south. There's a little circle around that gas pipeline that ties us into the field fuel gas system.

We will be the only chemical reformer connected to, you know, 7 or 8 billion cubic feet of natural gas that cycles through the Prudhoe Bay field every day. And just a few notes for those not familiar with how shockingly remarkable that is, that, you know, the United Kingdom as a country uses about 6 billion cubic feet a day. And we take 7 or 8 out of the rocks and push them back down to the rocks again in Prudhoe Bay every day. So this is— these are nation-sized volumes of natural gas that are moving through here every day.

Our project timeline, you know, we obviously, you know, it's been 11 years since So I was like, that would be a neat idea. And there were a lot of twists and turns on the way, which would probably take significantly longer than my speaking slot. But things really came to a culminating point in February of last year when— I'd really like to thank our friends at ConocoPhillips. They've been an amazing partner. And we were able to sign contracts which underpinned approval of our equity investment in the project.

Then we were able to work with ADA in order to secure debt for the approximate other half of the funding for the project and signed that, that deal in June for the construction and long-term debt financing. Then in September of last year, we began procurement and fabrication. So this is going to be a modular plant. There's about 220 20 truckloads, all of them truckable. None of this will not be sea lift, and everything's getting trucked up and put together on site.

Most of that— the chemical plant will be built in Houston by Plant Process Equipment. Ken Reno from Plant Process Equipment is around here in the audience somewhere. He's—. He's—. I think saw his first snowflake ever on Friday when we went up to the slope.

And, and there— this is a picture there facility where they're welding these skids together. And so they started on that back in October. Now in just this last couple of weeks, we got out there on the site and started taking 60-foot steel piles and driving them into the ground in order to be able to start preparing the site to receive these modules. And so, yeah, so by sometime middle of next summer, we should be able to be mechanically complete with the building, begin commissioning, and then we're hoping by the end of 2027, we should be shipping out commercial, in full commercial production.

So here's a picture of us on Friday. There's a bunch of these people are in the room today. In the background, you see two pile rigs. So this is NES doing the work up there, and boy, did they get out after it. We signed the contract, and they were out there within hours with like 8 pieces of equipment, just, you know, going to town.

So there are those— we've got 2 drill rigs running 24 hours a day drilling pilot holes about 48-foot deep, and then we've got those 2 cranes, and you can You can kind of see one of them is dangling a very long piece of steel pipe. They hook a hydraulic hammer to the top of it and it goes, "Brrr," and jiggles the whole thing down for 50 feet, leaves 10 feet of steel sticking out the top and then, "Brrr," take off the top 2 feet, put everything on top of it and then that keeps our hot chemical plant from melting the frozen ground under it. If you're not familiar with Arctic construction, it's really interesting because you're not going down to bedrock or anything. You're taking steel and letting it freeze hard into the ground and building up off of that. But then you got to make sure it doesn't warm up.

Can't have champagne there, so we made champagne cupcakes. And there you can see Sarah, who's here today helping run the energy conference, distributing our champagne cupcakes for our toast. There we are signing our ceremonial steel pile, so that will be at least as long as Sharpie lasts on steel, memorialize our ceremonial pile. And that's just a cool shot of a drill rig tearing into the pad.

So yes, thank you. Look, if anybody has any questions, I have lots of, you know, opinions and ideas, and I'm very proud of this whole thing, and I'd really like to be just a huge shout out to all the very, very many people who who have been supportive of this project and who have helped it come to fruition. None of these things happen without a lot of people being involved. In fact, Ada had a videographer, Joey, who not just— who didn't just take some footage but put it together into a sweet little 90-second film clip in the time since Friday. So, if you don't mind, I would I just got another 90-second ADA video which will show you some other aspects of the groundbreaking.

Hit it, Martin. The entire reason that this project is happening has its roots in ADA's efforts. We're here on sunny Prudhoe Bay as we prepare to celebrate the groundbreaking for America's first petrochemical facility in the Arctic.

What we're doing with Alieschem is creating a plant to make methanol and to desulfurize diesel. And this is something that almost every chemical engineer who's gone through the North Slope for the last 40 years has known that would be useful. AIDA's role is economic development and job creation within the state. That's our our primary mission, and we felt that this particular project did just that in the form of creating value-add for the oil and gas industry here, as well as substituting imported methanol from out of country and producing it here at home. Ada's ability to be creative, to do something outside the box, to do something that the local banks just simply cannot do due to regulatory purposes For that purpose, it was excellent to work with ADA and have a lender that could be creative like that and do something outside the box that the banks just aren't willing to do.

Having an investor like ADA that's able to see the entire impact to the state's economy and really take a strategic view in Alaska's best interest, we're going to wind up with, you know, being able to start seeing the state be more self-reliant in its own critical commodities and better use use its natural resources because we have that kind of a long-term investor.

All right. Thank you to everybody and enjoy the conference.

Listen, he gets a gold star because he brought me a cookie back from the ground.