Houston (Platts)--25Feb2010/725 pm EST/025 GMT

Veteran oilman turned ardent natural gas advocate T. Boone Pickens said Thursday that the development of shale gas plays in the lower-48 states means there is no need to build a pipeline to move gas from the North Slope of Alaska to the US.

"You don't need it. All they have up there is 39 Tcf and that's the blow-down gas in the Prudhoe Bay oilfield," Pickens said on the sidelines of the Texas Independent Producers and Royalty Owners' annual meeting in Houston.

Two consortia are vying to build a 4 Bcf/d, $40 billion pipeline from Alaska through Canada to the US Midwest; open seasons for both projects are scheduled for this spring.

But Pickens said the gas reserves in place on the North Slope are not sufficient to make a project of that magnitude economically feasible.

"We've got so much gas" in the Lower-48 states, he said, adding that some estimates place the volume of unproduced gas in Texas' Barnett Shale alone at 50 Tcf.

"We've got more gas in Texas than they've got in Alaska. I don't want to cut them down. They just need more gas to build an expensive pipeline," he said.

Pickens addressed the conference on behalf of his Pickens Plan, which calls for replacing the existing fleet of 18-wheel tractor trailers with natural-gas fired trucks over the next decade.

Such a move would cut domestic consumption of oil from the Middle East roughly in half and increase US demand for gas from 12 Bcf/d to 18 Bcf/d, he said.

--Jim Magill, jim_magill@platts.com