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Industry watchdog doing maintenance audit Review will assess upkeep at Valdez Marine Terminal; former Alyeska Pipeline executive Dan Hisey hired to write report due in June Wesley Loy For Petroleum News
A nonprofit organization that acts as watchdog over Alaska’s oil tanker port at Valdez is undertaking a “maintenance audit” of the facility.
The Valdez Marine Terminal is where tank ships pick up loads of North Slope crude oil for delivery to predominantly West Coast refineries.
The Prince William Sound Regional Citizens’ Advisory Council, based in Valdez, decided at its September 2010 board meeting to conduct the audit of maintenance practices at the terminal.
Recent problems along the 800-mile oil pipeline that ends at Valdez helped inspire the maintenance audit, said RCAC spokesman Stan Jones.
Those problems include an extended shutdown of the pipeline in January following discovery of an oil leak at Pump Station 1 on the North Slope, and an overflow of crude from a holding tank in May 2010 at Pump Station 9 south of Fairbanks.
The RCAC, a congressionally mandated organization created after the 1989 Exxon Valdez oil spill, doesn’t have oversight of the pipeline, just the terminal.
The council says it has identified a number of maintenance concerns at the facility.
Anchorage-based Alyeska Pipeline Service Co. operates both the pipeline and terminal on behalf of owners BP, ConocoPhillips, ExxonMobil, Chevron and Koch Industries.
An Alyeska spokeswoman did not respond to a request for comment on the maintenance audit.
Two-stage review “Staff and volunteers became concerned about the status of maintenance at the VMT after a number of perhaps maintenance issues became visible,” an RCAC briefing paper on the maintenance audit says. “As a whole, these concerns appear to be associated with deferral of preventive maintenance.”
The concerns have to do with certain valves, the terminal’s electrical systems, the loading arms that deliver crude to tankers, the condition of storage tanks and the integrity of “secondary containment cells.”
The briefing paper also notes “the considerable turnover in VMT staff during the past three years.”
Jones said the maintenance audit will occur in two stages. First will be a review of maintenance “paperwork” to gain a sense of terminal upkeep.
Then comes selection of a couple of major systems at the terminal for a closer, physical examination, Jones said.
The RCAC has committed $102,800 for the maintenance audit, to come from the organization’s existing budget. The RCAC operates mainly on the approximately $3 million it receives annually from Alyeska.
Under its contract with Alyeska, the RCAC’s board, staff and contractors have access to Alyeska’s records and facilities, Jones said.
Hisey hired The RCAC has awarded a contract to Dan Hisey of Bellingham, Wash., to conduct the maintenance audit.
Hisey is quite familiar with the terminal, having previously worked as chief operating officer for Alyeska. He left the firm in 2005.
In a March 15 interview with Petroleum News, Hisey said Alyeska, when it renewed the pipeline right of way in 2003 for another 30 years of operation, adopted a process known as “reliability-centered maintenance” or RCM. It was a step Hisey said he endorsed while at Alyeska.
RCM is a respected maintenance strategy generally defined as a way to ensure that assets keep doing what their users want them to do.
The maintenance audit will seek to verify that systems at the Valdez Marine Terminal are receiving proper maintenance either through RCM, for the larger systems, or “other maintenance paradigms” used for smaller and less complicated systems, the RCAC’s briefing paper says.
Hisey said he didn’t have any specific systems in mind for up-close examination.
Some important systems at the terminal deal with power generation, vapor control, treatment of ballast water from tankers and the berth loading arms.
Another former Alyeska manager, Darryl Hammond, will help with the maintenance audit. Hisey said Hammond, who retired from Alyeska in December 2010, spent years working with RCM on the pipeline.
Hisey said he’s hopeful the maintenance audit will be useful not only for the RCAC, but for Alyeska as well.
The final audit report is expected by June 30.
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