40TCF comparison to Prudhoe Bay 28TCFFrontier Gas
Frontier basins are those with no immediate plans for significant production. They include the Beaufort Sea, Mackenzie Delta, the Arctic Islands, the Labrador basins and the Grand Banks basins. The cost of development, mainly for pipelines, means that production is not yet economically feasible, despite the giant gas fields found there in the 1970s and 1980s.
One small gas project is now producing near Inuvik, Northwest Territories. The Ikhil reservoir flows about 60 thousand m3/d (2 MMcf/d) of gas for distribution in Inuvik.
Recently, pipeline companies and other developers have discussed building pipelines from the northern extremities of the existing North American gas pipeline grid to the large discoveries in the Mackenzie Delta-Beaufort Sea and Alaska. There is about 255 billion m3 (9 Tcf) of discovered gas in the Mackenzie Delta-Beaufort Sea, and 784 billion m3 (28 Tcf) in Prudhoe Bay, Alaska. If a pipeline linked these fields to the existing pipeline grid, further development of the fields would be economical. Formidable engineering, financial and regulatory obstacles, however, must be overcome before such pipelines can be built.