we could run short this winter

and the utilities already wrote the list of who gets rationed first.

Enstar's president said the quiet part out loud this week. If this winter looks like last winter, Southcentral doesn't get through it without rationing gas.

Cook Inlet just isn't producing what we use anymore, and storage came out of a cold spring lower than anybody wanted.

Here's how rough the math is. Enstar pays about eight dollars and seventy eight cents per unit under its Hilcorp contract. Its blended cost right now sits closer to ten eighty. It offered seventeen fifty, nearly double, to get somebody to drill new wells in the Inlet. Nobody took it.

Homer Electric put it plainer. A winter like last one, and we may be in trouble.

If it does come to rationing, the order is already set. Industrial plants go first, then businesses, then churches, schools, hospitals and houses last. Your furnace is at the back of the line, which is where you want to be, but it's still a line.

Matanuska Electric has already stretched its diesel backup from about two weeks of running to about two months.

And Enstar says it has to file to build gas import facilities by the end of this year, with gas maybe showing up in twenty twenty nine. That's three more winters of this.