Hilcorp's secrecy and the future of the trans-Alaska pipeline

Alaska news organizations have paid little attention to the financial secrecy of Hilcorp, the privately owned Texas company that purchased BP’s 49 percent share of the trans-Alaska pipeline and its other Alaska holdings.

Inside Climate News has this thorough report that examines the issue in impressive detail. Every Alaskan should read it. Hilcorp is the largest private oil and gas operator in the state.

One of the key questions is Hilcorp’s ability to respond to future maintenance and unexpected operational challenges in Alaska. For its BP purchase, the company created a new subsidiary legally separate from its parent company, owned by Texas billionaire Jeff Hildebrand.

The Regulatory Commission of Alaska has allowed Hilcorp to withhold financial information that publicly owned companies would have to disclose. Former Lt. Gov. Stephen McAlpine, who was replaced by Gov. Mike Dunleavy on the commission by Fairbanks minister Keith Kurber, was on the losing end of a 4-1 vote allowing Hilcorp to keep documents secret.

He wrote of the documents in March 2020 that “subjecting the entire transaction to intense debate far outweighs the petitioners’ interest in keeping them confidential. Instead, Hilcorp has invited an unnecessary public relations nightmare over what may come of the lifeblood of our state. Now public scrutiny may well be based on speculation as to what the documents may or may not say rather than a complete airing of the facts as they exist.”

McAlpine, in an interview with Inside Climate News, said he believes that the other owners of the pipeline, Exxon and ConocoPhillips, have the resources to protect their investments in Alaska, but he has questions about Hilcorp.

“Will they step up to the plate? I don’t know the answer to that question; nobody does,” McAlpine said of Hilcorp executives. “It’s a legitimate question to ask and it begs answers that we just don’t have.”

Hilcorp says the RCA and other agencies have all the information they need about the company’s finances, wrote reporter David Hasemyer.

“The fact that this information has not been made public does not mean that Harvest Alaska is attempting to evade responsibility to prove that it is sufficiently well-capitalized,” Hilcorp attorney Michael McLaughlin wrote to the commission in the company’s 2019 petition for confidentiality.