our gas is running short

and the company that heats most of Southcentral just said it might not have enough to get us through winter.

Enstar warms somewhere around a hundred and fifty thousand homes, from Anchorage out to the Valley and down onto the Kenai. Their president didn't sugarcoat it. He said conditions are not looking good, and that we simply need more gas produced to make it through the cold months ahead.

Here's what's squeezing the supply. State regulators just turned down a plan that would've let Enstar tuck away a big cushion of gas inside an old reservoir near Kenai. That storage project carried a two hundred forty million dollar price tag, and it would've added roughly ten to twelve dollars a month onto our bills.

Enstar isn't walking away from it. They're asking the regulators to take another look this month. But if nothing shifts, they've warned they may ask all of us to turn our thermostats down this winter just to stretch what's already in the pipeline.

The longer-term backup plan is shipping gas in from outside, and that's the part that really hits the wallet, because imported gas almost always costs more than what we pull out of the ground here. For any household in Southcentral that heats with gas, that's the number worth watching before the snow starts flying.