Comment.  Today, the House Finance Committee will meet in the Anchorage legislative information office beginning at 9 a.m., to take testimony on HB 110, which would modify the most onerous oil and gas tax-royalty structure in North America.  Readers will note from yesterday’s story below that the State’s economic lifeline could be severed any day.  By not rapidly improving Alaska’s investment climate as Alberta did (and as the NWT is trying to do – see story below) and by maintaining a complex array and huge burden of royalties, property taxes, income taxes and the predatory production tax, Alaska’s legislative leaders are betting that the Trans Alaska Pipeline (TAPS) lifeline will not lose critical throughput in the next 5-10 years and that a mechanical malfunction or act of God will not cause a shutdown today, tomorrow or next month.  Reducing taxes to make Alaska more competitive, as the Governor Sean Parnell (NGP Photo) has

attempted to do via HB 110, seems like a no brainer to those realistically fixed on the fiscal unsustainability elected officials have created.  (More comment coming by tomorrow….  -dh) 

PNA, by Gary Park.  The Canadian government is pondering ways to improve its northern regulatory processes, a federal official told a northern gas symposium in Calgary earlier in March where participants got a detailed insight into the costs and challenges faced by E&P companies.

PNA.  Having emerged intact from a drawn-out, tangled regulatory process, the Mackenzie Gas Project now faces a fresh round of challenges, building toward a final corporate decision on whether to start construction.  The venture is now largely in the hands of its proponents, who now have to weigh the future of North American gas demand and price outlook as they try to decide whether it can be economically viable in the 2018-20 startup period and for at least the next 30 years.  The National Energy Board, following approval from the federal government cabinet, issued a certificate of public convenience and necessity March 9.