President Donald Trump on Wednesday is expected to announce a commitment by South Korea to invest $54 billion in a liquefied natural gas pipeline in Alaska, a White House official said.

White House spokesperson Taylor Rogers said Trump will “announce major energy infrastructure investments that deliver on his day one promises to unleash American energy and unlock Alaska’s extraordinary resource potential.”

The expected 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.

Gov. Mike Dunleavy earlier this year asked the Alaska Legislature to pass a multibillion-dollar property tax break for the project in an effort to reduce the cost of the project. 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 with 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 the company would again pursue a tax overhaul in 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.

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.

The project received renewed interest after Trump promised to prioritize the project in an executive order signed in January 2025.

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