State gas corporation denies mess up on Port/Point MacKenzie

The Alaska Gasline Development Corporation insists that there is no Port/Point MacKenzie confusion or deception, contrary to claims by the Matanuska-Susitna Borough. 

The borough alleges that the previous generation of pipeline planners, led by ExxonMobil, looked at Point MacKenzie for a gas plant, but that is the wrong spot, as it is three miles from Port MacKenzie. "The deception was carried out by AGDC and ExxonMobil repeatedly saying that 'Point MacKenzie' and 'Port MacKenzie' is one and the same site," the borough complained to the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission.

The main point raised by AGDC in response is a 2015 hearing at which Marc Van Dongen, then the Port Mackenzie director, testified that the port wanted the pipeline to go to Nikiski not to the port or the point:  "I would like to start out by saying first that we all strongly support the AK LNG project going to Nikiski."

In the map below, the port is at the bottom, while the point is near the top.

The port is named after the point,  probably named by George Vancouver's expedition in 1794 for the Right Hon. James Stuart Mackenzie, an astronomer and  politician from Scotland. If so, the capital "K' doesn't belong in either the point or the port.

Mackenzie married his first cousin, Elizabeth Campbell, whose name was also sprinkled on the local landscape by the Vancouver expedition. She may be the namesake of Campbell Creek. 

In 2000, Anchorage Daily News columnist Mike Doogan took a two-hour drive from Anchorage to Point MacKenzie, less than two miles across the water from the Anchorage skyline, and said this about the point/port and visions of the future:

 "Of course, I've seen artist's conceptions of Point MacKenzie before. There was the Knik Arm Crossing, an oft-conceived bridge or causeway, sometimes with tidal power generators, sometimes not, to connect Anchorage with its sketched-in bedroom community across the water. There was Seward's Success, a climate-controlled city connected to Anchorage by a high-speed aerial tramway. The Point MacKenzie Dairy Project, part of Gov. Jay Hammond's ill-fated green development scheme, actually leaped off the drawing boards, only to crash into a flaming mass of bankruptcies and finger-pointing. For more than a generation, Point MacKenzie has been where big ideas go to die."