Alaska Gov. Dunleavy leading delegation to United Arab Emirates to court investment in state’s resource industry

Alaska Gov. Mike Dunleavy and other state officials are set to travel to the United Arab Emirates in the coming days to discuss investment opportunities in Alaska.

Dunleavy said earlier this week that the idea for the trip came after he met Martina Strong, the U.S. ambassador to the United Arab Emirates, at an energy conference he hosted in Anchorage last year.

“She and we believe that there is some tremendous opportunity to highlight Alaska to investors worldwide, at a worldwide conference. That’s the reason we are going over to Dubai,” Dunleavy said during a press conference in which he discussed the state’s energy supply earlier this week.

The U.S.-UAE Business Council is scheduled to host a reception for Dunleavy on Monday. According to the council, Dunleavy is “leading a delegation from Alaska to the UAE to discuss Alaska’s wealth of resources and exports, including critical minerals.”

The council said the delegation was set to “discuss investment in the areas of energy, construction, mining, technology, airport cargo, and logistics.”

Dunleavy is expected to attend the World Future Energy Summit, a three-day conference in Abu Dhabi that begins on Tuesday. Dunleavy is scheduled to give a 10-minute presentation on Wednesday.

Dunleavy said he’d previously left the country on state business three times during his six-year tenure as governor — twice to Japan for talks about a gas pipeline and once to an investment conference in Germany.

“Some people will say: ‘Well, why do you have to do that?’ To be honest with you, I asked that question the first year I came into office,” Dunleavy said, adding that he later learned some investors did not have Alaska on their radar.

“A lot of the investors told me they thought Alaska was kind of closed,” Dunleavy said. “(Investors thought) that the environmentalists had basically shut it off and created an environment that was unstable for investment.”

“Our goal in our discussions with investors is to get them to see otherwise,” Dunleavy said.

Dunleavy said that the cost for the trip to UAE — which is set to include representatives from the Alaska Gasline Development Corp., the Department of Natural Resources and the Alaska Energy Authority — could be around $75,000 in travel expenses.

“Whatever it costs, one investment could be multitudes of that in Alaska,” he said.

At the SuperReturn conference in Berlin in 2023, Dunleavy met with investors to discuss the resource industry in Alaska. While at the conference, he said in an interview that Alaska is “probably going to get some investment out of this.” In the months since the conference, he has not referenced any specific investments made linked to his appearance in Germany.

Dunleavy’s total cost of that trip, which also included stops in France, California, and numerous communities in Alaska, was $21,747. Dunleavy was accompanied by his chief of staff, Tyson Gallagher, who reported $6,517 in travel costs associated with the trip.

In 2022, Dunleavy traveled to Tokyo, where he met with oil and gas officials. The trip was meant to drum up interest in Alaska’s natural gas. Dunleavy reported $2,357 in travel expenses. Frank Richards, president of the Alaska Gasline Development Corp., traveled with Dunleavy on the trip and reported $17,224 in travel expenses.

In 2019, Dunleavy reported more than $8,000 in expenses associated with a trip to Japan.

Dunleavy said he is “not a big fan of traveling” and that traveling was “painful for obvious reasons” owing to his height.

The governor regularly travels out of state, including recent trips to Washington, D.C., to meet with members of Congress; Houston, Texas to meet with oil executives; and California to attend an artificial intelligence conference.

It’s common for U.S. governors to travel to other countries to promote investment opportunities in their respective states, though past reviews of the practice found they have had mixed results. Following an Alaska trade mission to China led by former Gov. Bill Walker in 2018, Alaska businesses reported a spike in interest from Chinese companies.