Alaska Sen. Dan Sullivan stopped in Fairbanks Friday with the U.S. Secretary of Labor, the officials billing the trip as a chance to tour a local training center and meet with labor leaders.
The visit from Secretary of Labor Lori Chavez-DeRemer comes amid the Trump administration’s continued support for the Alaska Liquefied Natural Gas (LNG) project, an undertaking that would require significant skilled labor, and the stop at the Fairbanks Pipeline Training Center raises a question that’s recurred over the years.
If the gasline is going to get built, where will the workers come from to construct, operate and maintain it?
“That’s the million dollar question,” Jacob Howdeshell, the business manager for Laborers’ Local 942 and the chairman of the Fairbanks Pipeline Training Center Trust, said in an interview.
There’s still plenty of skepticism about the latest revival of the decades-long effort to build a 807-mile proposed gas pipeline from the North Slope to a liquefaction facility in Nikiski. But Howdeshell said, aside from some degree of “healthy cynicism,” he does believe the project will get built this time around.
Howdeshell said, if that happens, there would be a nationwide search to recruit workers, comparing it to the construction of the Trans-Alaska Pipeline System in the 1970s, but he said he thinks the labor pool would be more local than that, and possibly more qualified.
“It would look a lot like TAPS. I think you’d see a lot more homegrown [labor]. We didn’t have a lot of these training opportunities or facilities then,” he said. “It was just like, ‘Hey, do you have a pair of boots and a heartbeat? Let’s go put you out and build a pipeline.’”
On Friday, Howdeshell was standing inside one of those facilities, the Fairbanks Pipeline Training Center, which helps people enter apprenticeships for careers in the oil and gas and construction industries.
The labor supply for the proposed LNG project is something businesses, state and federal leaders have grappled with multiple times before. In 2018, the Alaska Department of Labor and Workforce Development published a Gasline Workforce Plan that aimed to lay out a framework for investing in and expanding training opportunities.
“Our guiding principle as we prepare to build this project is simple: Alaskans first,” then-Gov. Bill Walker and Heidi Drygas, the state labor department’s then-commissioner, wrote in a letter introducing that report, which said gas could be flowing through the pipeline as early as 2024.
During a brief press conference Friday, Chavez-DeRemer told reporters she wants to understand how the U.S. Department of Labor can help develop the local workforce, and she noted the goal is for the Alaska LNG project to create about 10,000 jobs. Only a tenth of those are estimated to be long-term operational roles, however, though that doesn’t account for indirect job creation.
“We want mortgage-paying jobs for everybody who’s here. We want people in Alaska to stay here,” Chavez-DeRemer said. “Where’s the best economy going to grow? With homegrown Alaskans right here.”
Even without an influx of pipeline construction jobs, though, Alaska is facing a resident worker shortage. A report published by Alaska’s Department of Labor earlier this year found that the nonresident workforce hit its highest point in almost three decades as of 2023, reaching 22.5% across all industries. Recent increases in nonresident workers are even more pronounced in the construction industry, Rob Kreiger, a state economist, said in the report.
“The industry's need for nonresidents is also clear in its mix of occupations,” he wrote in February. “Nonresidents are often hired into specialized positions employers can’t find qualified residents to fill.”
The report also says the shortage of resident labor is likely to continue due to the ongoing decline in the working-age population in Alaska, as well as a streak of net migration losses that has lasted more than a decade.
Meanwhile, Glenfarne, the majority owner and lead developer of the Alaska LNG project, says it plans to reach a final investment decision by the end of the year. Sullivan referred to that timeline on Friday.
“That means it’s go time. We’re going to need thousands of well-trained workers. This place is going to be training people 24/7,” Sullivan said.
Alaska’s junior senator also said he thinks it’s time to summon funds Congress authorized in 2004. Under that law, if Alaska’s governor and the U.S. secretary of energy agree there’s a reasonable expectation the pipeline’s construction will begin within two years, the U.S. labor secretary can release $20 million in grants to the Alaska Workforce Investment Board.
Up to 15% of the funds could go toward building a training facility in Fairbanks. The legislation says the funds are also to “recruit and train adult and dislocated workers in Alaska, including Alaska Natives.”
“We think that moment is now,” Sullivan said Friday. “So we briefed the secretary on that.”
The labor secretary’s visit also comes a little more than a week after the U.S. Department of Education announced it will stop funding a program supporting Alaska Native and Native Hawaiian-serving institutions.
The education department says that program, among others, is “racially discriminatory,” and that the department will reprogram $350 million from them.
University of Alaska Fairbanks leadership has said the decision translates to a little under $9 million in canceled funding for UAF. The loss affects some career training and workforce development programs available to students at the UAF Community and Technical College, including American Sign Language, information technology technician training and private pilot ground school, according to reporting from the Alaska Beacon.
Alaska Sens. Lisa Murkowski and Sullivan signed onto a bipartisan letter last week that urges the U.S. Department of Education to continue two of the seven programs the department said it would no longer fund, including the one impacting UAF.
The letter says the grants under those programs support institutions that carry out the federal government’s trust responsibility to educate American Indians, Alaska Natives and Native Hawaiian students.
The letter also says withholding the funding goes against the administration’s prior commitments to delivering on statutory grant programs that support Native students, and runs counter to the administration’s “focus on increasing access to career and technical education.”