As talk continues about gas lines, bullet lines and spurs, it's a 3,200-foot pipeline in Anchor Point that best symbolizes the strange state of Alaska natural gas in 2011.

The pipeline doesn't have a name and, right now, it doesn't do anything. Within the next few months, though, it will start delivering natural gas to Chapman Elementary School, and sometime next year, it could be the first step in delivering natural gas to Homer.

While the rest of Southcentral Alaska has enjoyed a cheap, abundant supply of gas of decades, Homer has relied on heating oil -- paying an economic and an environmental price that other communities don't pay.

That means Homer has paid millions more for heating than households and businesses from Wasilla to Soldotna. Since late 2007, Homer's dependence on heating oil has run against its Climate Action Plan.

Homer is closer than ever to getting natural gas, but the Cook Inlet market looks much different than it did a quarter century ago. If Homer gets natural gas, it will also get all the benefits and all the heartaches felt by the rest of Southcentral Alaska.

'Homer will get gas'

Why didn't Homer get natural gas sooner?

"The biggest overriding thing is, of course, economics," said John Sims, a spokesman for Enstar Natural Gas Co., the largest gas company in Alaska. "The second is gas supply."

Southcentral lucked into natural gas. While searching for oil in the late 1950s, companies stumbled upon huge natural gas reservoirs. Without an outside market, they signed long-term contracts locally, giving the Anchorage area decades of cheap fuel.

With the Prudhoe Bay discovery in 1968, those companies mostly stopped exploring the Cook Inlet. That chicken is just now coming home to roost for most of Southcentral, but Homer felt the impact much sooner. The oldest fields in the Cook Inlet -- like Kenai, Swanson River and Beluga River -- are located in the northern end of the basin. The few thousand customers in the Homer area didn't justify a 50-mile pipeline heading south.

So while Homer got natural gas-backed electricity, it continued to burn oil for heat.

That started to change in the late 1990s when a series of small explorers began poking around North Fork. Standard Oil Co. of California discovered the prospect 10 miles north of Homer in the 1960s, but never developed it. With renewed interest in the field, the southern Kenai saw the possibility of having a gas supply in its own back yard.

That optimism led Enstar to establish a service area for Homer. "Homer will get gas if Enstar gets a certificate," Enstar attorney Julian Mason said during regulatory hearings in 1997. "It's never failed to deliver and it doesn't plan to start with Homer."

The explorers didn't deliver, though. The North Fork field hopscotched from promising well results to regulatory proceedings to out-of-the box development plans until 2007, when Armstrong Oil and Gas -- a Denver independent responsible for jumpstarting North Slope exploration in the early 2000s, bought the prospect.

Armstrong found commercial amounts of gas the following year and eventually signed a contract with Enstar to move the gas north into the existing grid, bypassing Homer.

Armstrong and Enstar are just weeks away from finishing that new pipeline system.

Natural gas prospects, uncertain

That decision may actually work to Homer's advantage. Before Armstrong and Enstar started building their pipelines, Homer needed to find a gas supply it could call its own: a nearby field with enough natural gas to last for decades.

Candidates always existed, but momentum hasn't. For years, the southern Kenai seemed like a series of dominoes poised to fall: once one company developed a field, other leaseholders in the region would soon follow suit.

With North Fork almost online, though, the future of its neighbors is uncertain.