President Donald Trump on Wednesday touted what he described as a commitment by South Korea to invest $54 billion in a liquefied natural gas pipeline in Alaska.

Surrounded by Alaska leaders and members of his cabinet, Trump said his administration’s trade agreement with South Korea would subsidize the construction of the costly 800-mile gas line that has been sought for decades.

The announcement comes as Glenfarne, a privately held company that owns a majority of the Alaska LNG project, has yet to announce a final investment decision, a critical step needed for the project to move forward. South Korean officials recently said that the Alaska LNG project was still under review for commercial viability, a Korean news outlet reported Wednesday.

Glenfarne executives previously indicated that they aimed to have the final investment decision by December 2025. The goalpost has repeatedly moved since then.

In a discussion with the Anchorage Daily News editorial board last week, Glenfarne executives again reiterated that they are confident the project will move forward, but said that a final investment decision is contingent on several steps that have yet to take place, including a change to Alaska’s tax structure that has faced obstacles in the Legislature.

The investment in the gas line is part of what Trump described as an agreement between his administration and South Korea intended to reduce the tariffs he imposed on the country.

“They paid to get them reduced and part of that money is going into that project. Otherwise, this project is so big it probably, I don’t know, maybe the money wouldn’t be available,” said Trump.

Representatives of the Korean government were not part of the White House event.

The nearly $200 billion South Korean investment, as described by Trump, would also go toward a natural gas power plant in Texas and eight new nuclear power plants across the country.

In the Oval Office, Gov. Mike Dunleavy said the Alaska LNG project will “save the state of Alaska.”

Glenfarne chief executive Brendan Duval, who attended the White House event, said that the project could begin delivering natural gas to Alaskans within three years, and exporting liquefied natural gas within five years.

Dunleavy earlier this year asked the Alaska Legislature to pass a multibillion-dollar property tax break for the project in an effort to reduce its cost. The tax bill did not pass amid opposition from key lawmakers, who criticized the lack of publicly available information on the project, its cost and long-term prospects.

Lawmakers also sought to tie the tax break to a change to Alaska’s corporate income taxes that would ensure the tax applies to oil and gas companies that don’t currently pay it, including S corporations. Opposition to that change from Hilcorp, a privately held oil and gas company, contributed to the failure of this year’s legislative efforts.

Becky Windt Pearson, head of Alaska legal affairs for Glenfarne, said last week that the company would again pursue a tax overhaul during the legislative session that begins in January. But that reform could look very different from the one pursued by Dunleavy, depending on who succeeds him in the governor’s mansion.

“I think what we will see next session, our prediction, is going to be something not exactly like what was in this last bill. I mean, depending on who sits in the governor’s chair,” Windt Pearson said.

“Just depending on where the Legislature and the governor land, who knows what we’ll see on the S corp tax front,” she said.

Democratic gubernatorial candidate Jonathan Kreiss-Tomkins has repeatedly said he would seek to reform Alaska’s corporate income taxes on oil and gas companies, a move that could increase annual state revenue by over $100 million. The three Republicans in the race have denounced those efforts.

Republican candidate Dave Bronson called on Trump to “federalize” the Alaska LNG project.

Windt Pearson said last week that the trade agreement with South Korea could be a “potential option for a federal program to come to the table and support the project and potentially move the timeline up and expedite how quickly we could complete it.” But Glenfarne was not involved in trade agreement conversations, its executives said.

“We’ve got a lot of support from the Trump administration. There’s a dialogue back-and-forth about potential ways we could take the project forward, but right now there are pieces of the project that need to be sorted out in terms of having all of the contracts in place and having a project that is financeable,” said Adam Prestidge, president of Glenfarne Alaska LNG.

The 800-mile pipeline to transport natural gas from the North Slope to Southcentral Alaska is a decades-old idea that has repeatedly been pursued, then scrapped, in large part due to the formidable cost of the project.

Trump promised to prioritize the project in an executive order signed in January 2025. He said Wednesday that he’d been hearing about the pipeline “from the time I’m a little boy.”

“I was always fascinated by it,” said Trump.

Alaska leaders, Trump and members of his cabinet used Wednesday’s event to rain effusive praise on U.S. Sen. Dan Sullivan, a Republican locked in a close race with Democratic challenger Mary Peltola, a former U.S. House representative.

Trump called Sullivan “a great senator who is totally responsible for this pipeline.”

In a statement released Wednesday, Peltola said she, too, supports the project.

Trump also used the Oval Office event to deride Dan J. Sullivan, another candidate in Alaska’s U.S. Senate race this year who shares a name with the incumbent.

“It’s crooked as hell,” Trump said. “They put up a man with his exact name, they picked him out of a hat.”

Asked why Sen. Sullivan appeared to be trailing in some polls, Trump said that “the people of Alaska, who I love, don’t know how good he is.”

“If the people of Alaska knew what I know, and I know the real facts, there wouldn’t even be a race,” said Trump.

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