Freak Out
06-20-2007, 07:26 PM
Happy Birthday TAPS!
The pipeline at 30
By Eric Lidji
Published June 20, 2007
At the time, 66 minutes probably seemed like forever.
North Slope field workers were supposed to start pumping oil into the new trans-Alaska oil pipeline at 9 a.m. sharp on the morning of June 20, 1977–30 years ago today–but didn’t push the final button until 10:06 a.m., the result of what one official at the time called, “a little bit of pre-startup jitters.”
Even through construction on the project had been fast-tracked by Congress with a tie-breaking vote from Vice President Spiro Agnew, the project had been in the works for a while. Petroleum engineers discovered the Prudhoe Bay oil field in 1968, and the 1973 Arab oil embargo had made having a large domestic oil supply seem like a necessity.
Oil didn’t just tumble into the pipeline unassisted, though. A procession of items went into the pipeline to prepare the way: Engineers first released nitrogen into the line, followed by the first mechanical pig to inspect the integrity of the pipe. The pig moved several miles down the line pushed by diesel fuel, which has a high flash point and would be less likely to explode in an accident.
Finally, crude oil began coursing across Alaska.
Since that day, the pipeline has moved more than 15.5 billion barrels of crude oil. It has also made Alaska wealthy in the process.
“Going down is just as difficult as going up.”
Throughput should be large and spills should be small.
That’s all the complexity of the oil pipeline business simplified to its basics.
Throughput measures the amount of oil moving from Pump Station 1 on the North Slope to the Valdez Marine Terminal in Prince William Sound. The past 30 years of throughput looks like a bell as production quickly “ramped up” over the first decade and slowly declined ever since.
“As anyone who climbs mountains knows, going down is just as difficult as going up,” Alyeska President Kevin Hostler told the Greater Fairbanks Chamber of Commerce on Tuesday.
Throughput peaked around 1988, when the pipeline averaged more than 2 million barrels every day. The pipeline now moves around 775,000 barrels daily.
The value of Alaska North Slope oil has more than tripled since 1988, but that doesn’t automatically balance out profit margins. Corrosion prevention has had to increase with the age of the pipeline and with the introduction of new technology. Plus, lower throughputs are more difficult and costly to move.
“The line really wouldn’t be making money if it was operating in the way it was operating in the high throughput years of 1977 through 1989,” said Bill Howitt, a former senior vice president for Alyeska in Fairbanks, who retired to Oregon last year. “It has to be more efficient.”
Howitt and a team of engineers conceived the Strategic Reconfiguration project in 2001 to comprehensively change the basic way Alyeska operates the pipeline, especially with less oil.
The project reached its first major milestone this year by replacing the diesel turbines at Pump Station 9 near Delta Junction with an electric pump system able to shift across a range of throughputs from 300,000 barrels each day to 1.1 million barrels if new oil fields come online.
“The public didn’t feel that way.”
“Even though we’re moving a lot of oil, we never want to see the oil,” said operations manager John Baldridge, another 30-year veteran.
Pipeline workers aren’t always that fortunate, though, Baldridge noted.
Including spills from shipping vessels and contractors, Alyeska reports spilling 288,515 barrels of oil in 755 incidents on the trans-Alaska oil pipeline, an average of 9,617 barrels and 25 spills each year.
Alyeska proudly boasts that corrosion has never caused a leak on the mainline of the pipe, which excludes pump stations and the Prudhoe Bay pipeline network. The three largest spills were largely out of Alyeska’s control, caused by a tanker crash, an act of sabotage and a bullet hole. The bullet hole came from a .338 Winchester Magnum rifle owned by Daniel Lewis, who is currently serving a prison term for shooting the pipeline near Livengood, causing a $13 million clean up effort.
The largest spill, though, is still the most famous.
The Exxon Valdez tanker ran aground in Prince William Sound on March 24, 1989, spilling 11 million gallons of oil into the waters.
“For a little while, people were ashamed to say they worked for the oil industry and ashamed to say they worked for Alyeska,” Howitt said.
The Exxon Valdez incident changed the culture of Alyeska, according to Elden Johnson, who has been working on the pipeline since design began in 1973. He now leads Alyeska’s System Integrity Team, which is responsible for keeping leaks from happening.
“That was such a shock to see that oil on Prince William Sound. I just never imagined it could happen,” Johnson said. “I think at Alyeska, we thought the pipeline ended at the tunnel. The public didn’t feel that way.”
“All that came from the pipeline.”
“Ask me again in 35 years,” environmentalist Jim Kowalsky told News-Miner reporter Sue Lewis in 1977, when she asked for his thoughts on the pipeline.
Kowalsky had spent the previous seven years working on environmental issues related to the pipeline, first through the Fairbanks Environmental Center, which preceded the Northern Alaska Environmental Center, and later as the Fairbanks representative for the Friends of the Earth, a national conservation group. Kowalsky recently retired from the Rural Alaska Honors Institute.
Though he still has five years left on his request to consider the long-term implications of the pipeline, Kowalsky, who passes the pipeline every day coming to and from his home on Chena Hot Springs Road, said he has become somewhat accepting of the pipeline.
“You can’t help but be resigned to it,” Kowalsky said. “It’s there, and it is a reality and it has tremendous economic force behind it.”
Kowalsky said the environmental groups fighting the pipeline accurately predicted some of the worst outcomes, including the Exxon Valdez oil spill, but also failed to predict some of the best outcomes.
He believes work in the days before the pipeline brought national attention to environmental issues and eventually led to expansion of the Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act in 1971 and the Alaska National Interest Lands Conservation Act in 1980.
“All that came from the pipeline,” Kowalsky said.
“Mother Nature’s final exam”
During the fall of 2002, many Alyeska higher-ups found themselves preoccupied with renewing the pipeline right of way. The pipeline had turned 25 that summer, and a renewed permit would allow the pipeline to keep its pathway through Alaska for another 30 years.
The renewal process included studies to check the soundness of the pipeline system, but Elden Johnson, Alyeska’s System Integrity Team leader, said “Mother Nature’s final exam in the authorization of TAPS” came on Nov. 3, when Alaska experienced the largest inland earthquake North America has seen in almost 150 years.
The magnitude 7.9 earthquake, however, fell well within the standards the pipeline had been intended to withstand, meaning any major damage would be an engineering problem.
Engineers knew little about the Denali fault system when they designed the pipeline.
“You had to stand up on the mountain top and eyeball a straight line of where you thought the fault line would be,” Johnson said.
Bill Howitt, then senior vice president of Alyeska in Fairbanks, had been downstairs in his Gold Mine Trail cabin when the earthquake hit.
“When that thing started shaking, I just had this vision of all the logs coming down on my head,” Howitt said.
He drove in to the Fairbanks office and opened the Alyeska emergency center.
Alyeska crews and outside contractors started pouring in and heading out to sites along the pipeline, but in the end, the earthquake just knocked the pipeline off its support beams in one place. No oil was spilled.
Three weeks later, the state renewed the pipeline right of way permit for another 30 years. :five:
The pipeline at 30
By Eric Lidji
Published June 20, 2007
At the time, 66 minutes probably seemed like forever.
North Slope field workers were supposed to start pumping oil into the new trans-Alaska oil pipeline at 9 a.m. sharp on the morning of June 20, 1977–30 years ago today–but didn’t push the final button until 10:06 a.m., the result of what one official at the time called, “a little bit of pre-startup jitters.”
Even through construction on the project had been fast-tracked by Congress with a tie-breaking vote from Vice President Spiro Agnew, the project had been in the works for a while. Petroleum engineers discovered the Prudhoe Bay oil field in 1968, and the 1973 Arab oil embargo had made having a large domestic oil supply seem like a necessity.
Oil didn’t just tumble into the pipeline unassisted, though. A procession of items went into the pipeline to prepare the way: Engineers first released nitrogen into the line, followed by the first mechanical pig to inspect the integrity of the pipe. The pig moved several miles down the line pushed by diesel fuel, which has a high flash point and would be less likely to explode in an accident.
Finally, crude oil began coursing across Alaska.
Since that day, the pipeline has moved more than 15.5 billion barrels of crude oil. It has also made Alaska wealthy in the process.
“Going down is just as difficult as going up.”
Throughput should be large and spills should be small.
That’s all the complexity of the oil pipeline business simplified to its basics.
Throughput measures the amount of oil moving from Pump Station 1 on the North Slope to the Valdez Marine Terminal in Prince William Sound. The past 30 years of throughput looks like a bell as production quickly “ramped up” over the first decade and slowly declined ever since.
“As anyone who climbs mountains knows, going down is just as difficult as going up,” Alyeska President Kevin Hostler told the Greater Fairbanks Chamber of Commerce on Tuesday.
Throughput peaked around 1988, when the pipeline averaged more than 2 million barrels every day. The pipeline now moves around 775,000 barrels daily.
The value of Alaska North Slope oil has more than tripled since 1988, but that doesn’t automatically balance out profit margins. Corrosion prevention has had to increase with the age of the pipeline and with the introduction of new technology. Plus, lower throughputs are more difficult and costly to move.
“The line really wouldn’t be making money if it was operating in the way it was operating in the high throughput years of 1977 through 1989,” said Bill Howitt, a former senior vice president for Alyeska in Fairbanks, who retired to Oregon last year. “It has to be more efficient.”
Howitt and a team of engineers conceived the Strategic Reconfiguration project in 2001 to comprehensively change the basic way Alyeska operates the pipeline, especially with less oil.
The project reached its first major milestone this year by replacing the diesel turbines at Pump Station 9 near Delta Junction with an electric pump system able to shift across a range of throughputs from 300,000 barrels each day to 1.1 million barrels if new oil fields come online.
“The public didn’t feel that way.”
“Even though we’re moving a lot of oil, we never want to see the oil,” said operations manager John Baldridge, another 30-year veteran.
Pipeline workers aren’t always that fortunate, though, Baldridge noted.
Including spills from shipping vessels and contractors, Alyeska reports spilling 288,515 barrels of oil in 755 incidents on the trans-Alaska oil pipeline, an average of 9,617 barrels and 25 spills each year.
Alyeska proudly boasts that corrosion has never caused a leak on the mainline of the pipe, which excludes pump stations and the Prudhoe Bay pipeline network. The three largest spills were largely out of Alyeska’s control, caused by a tanker crash, an act of sabotage and a bullet hole. The bullet hole came from a .338 Winchester Magnum rifle owned by Daniel Lewis, who is currently serving a prison term for shooting the pipeline near Livengood, causing a $13 million clean up effort.
The largest spill, though, is still the most famous.
The Exxon Valdez tanker ran aground in Prince William Sound on March 24, 1989, spilling 11 million gallons of oil into the waters.
“For a little while, people were ashamed to say they worked for the oil industry and ashamed to say they worked for Alyeska,” Howitt said.
The Exxon Valdez incident changed the culture of Alyeska, according to Elden Johnson, who has been working on the pipeline since design began in 1973. He now leads Alyeska’s System Integrity Team, which is responsible for keeping leaks from happening.
“That was such a shock to see that oil on Prince William Sound. I just never imagined it could happen,” Johnson said. “I think at Alyeska, we thought the pipeline ended at the tunnel. The public didn’t feel that way.”
“All that came from the pipeline.”
“Ask me again in 35 years,” environmentalist Jim Kowalsky told News-Miner reporter Sue Lewis in 1977, when she asked for his thoughts on the pipeline.
Kowalsky had spent the previous seven years working on environmental issues related to the pipeline, first through the Fairbanks Environmental Center, which preceded the Northern Alaska Environmental Center, and later as the Fairbanks representative for the Friends of the Earth, a national conservation group. Kowalsky recently retired from the Rural Alaska Honors Institute.
Though he still has five years left on his request to consider the long-term implications of the pipeline, Kowalsky, who passes the pipeline every day coming to and from his home on Chena Hot Springs Road, said he has become somewhat accepting of the pipeline.
“You can’t help but be resigned to it,” Kowalsky said. “It’s there, and it is a reality and it has tremendous economic force behind it.”
Kowalsky said the environmental groups fighting the pipeline accurately predicted some of the worst outcomes, including the Exxon Valdez oil spill, but also failed to predict some of the best outcomes.
He believes work in the days before the pipeline brought national attention to environmental issues and eventually led to expansion of the Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act in 1971 and the Alaska National Interest Lands Conservation Act in 1980.
“All that came from the pipeline,” Kowalsky said.
“Mother Nature’s final exam”
During the fall of 2002, many Alyeska higher-ups found themselves preoccupied with renewing the pipeline right of way. The pipeline had turned 25 that summer, and a renewed permit would allow the pipeline to keep its pathway through Alaska for another 30 years.
The renewal process included studies to check the soundness of the pipeline system, but Elden Johnson, Alyeska’s System Integrity Team leader, said “Mother Nature’s final exam in the authorization of TAPS” came on Nov. 3, when Alaska experienced the largest inland earthquake North America has seen in almost 150 years.
The magnitude 7.9 earthquake, however, fell well within the standards the pipeline had been intended to withstand, meaning any major damage would be an engineering problem.
Engineers knew little about the Denali fault system when they designed the pipeline.
“You had to stand up on the mountain top and eyeball a straight line of where you thought the fault line would be,” Johnson said.
Bill Howitt, then senior vice president of Alyeska in Fairbanks, had been downstairs in his Gold Mine Trail cabin when the earthquake hit.
“When that thing started shaking, I just had this vision of all the logs coming down on my head,” Howitt said.
He drove in to the Fairbanks office and opened the Alyeska emergency center.
Alyeska crews and outside contractors started pouring in and heading out to sites along the pipeline, but in the end, the earthquake just knocked the pipeline off its support beams in one place. No oil was spilled.
Three weeks later, the state renewed the pipeline right of way permit for another 30 years. :five: