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BP: Bypass lines possible on east side Marshall tells legislators inspections continue, restart of eastern lines possible; replacement pipe ordered By Kristen Nelson Petroleum News
Legislators had a number of questions for BP Exploration (Alaska) President Steve Marshall at a joint meeting of the Alaska Legislature’s Senate and House Resources committees in Anchorage Aug. 18.
Marshall had come to talk about the decision the company made to shut down the Prudhoe Bay field Aug. 6, steps the company is taking to bring production back online and its North Slope corrosion program.
BP began shutting down the Prudhoe Bay field Aug. 6 after it found oil-stained insulation on a transit line in the eastern operating area — and later found a leak in the same area — where crews were checking results of a smart pig run which showed 16 anomalies in 12 locations. Ultimately only the eastern operating area was shut in, after an inspection of the western operating area by BP, agencies and its partners was completed. The wall-thickness loss in the western operating area did not require shutdown, Marshall said, and by Aug. 17 production was back to 217,000 barrels per day, more than half of the field’s normal 400,000 bpd production.
He said that while the eastern side of the field remains shut in, an inspection continues of the eastern transit lines — lines taking sales quality oil from processing centers to the trans-Alaska pipeline — and BP hopes to demonstrate that lines are in good enough condition to be able to bring that side of the field back into operation. Bypass lines BP had already announced plans to replace 16 miles of the 22 miles of transit lines on the eastern side of the field and that pipe has been ordered and should be on the slope in the fourth quarter. Inspections are continuing to determine if some lines can safely be restarted but the insulation is proving more difficult to remove on the eastern lines, Marshall said.
He also said BP is looking, in parallel, at a plan to install bypass lines on the eastern side, taking oil from Flow Station 1 and Flow Station 2 to the Endicott line, and oil from Flow Station 3 to the Lisburne line.
In response to a question from Rep. Paul Seaton, R-Homer, Marshall said bypass pipe would be 10-inch and is on the slope, sourced from Alyeska Pipeline Service Co. and ConocoPhillips Alaska. BP needs to acquire meters, valves and fittings for bypass lines, and “that activity will proceed in parallel” with inspections of the lines, “so we’ll have two options to pursue there … to restore the entire eastern operating area to production as quickly as we can.”
BP does have some 17,000 bpd of production on the eastern side from the Lisburne Production Center: that transit line had been smart pigged and found to be in good condition before the problem was discovered in the Flow Station 2 transit line. When FS2 to FS1 pigged? Sen. Kim Elton, D-Juneau, asked Marshall when the Flow Station 2 to Flow Station 1 transit line — the one which was found to be so corroded — had actually been pigged, noting that BP had said 1992 and then issued a retraction.
Marshall said BP took over the eastern operating area in 2000 and instituted ultrasonic testing on the line. It has the same geometry, the same fluids as the western area of Prudhoe that BP has operated since field startup, and Marshall said BP believed eastern transit lines would be in about the same condition as lines on the western side of the field pigged in 1998.
He said “the ultrasonic testing that we did on those eastern lines indeed confirmed that … the line was in good condition. Again, the events of the last two weeks show that that was incorrect.”
Marshall said BP has been checking the records for the eastern area lines and found they were maintenance pigged and a smart pig was run. “What ARCO (eastern operating area operator until 2000) was unable to get was good data from that pig.”
Bill Hedges, BP Exploration (Alaska)’s manager of corrosion strategy and planning, said he’d talked with someone involved in that pigging earlier in the week, “and his recollection was that we did in fact — or they did in fact — clean the line successfully, successfully enough that they were confident at putting a smart tool into the line. They put the smart tool into the line but the data they got out was actually very terrifying: it suggested that the entire pipe was fully corroded through.”
Spot checks were done on the line, “and found actually that the line was in very good condition. It raised questions about the tool — there was some research done — and in fact the tool was subsequently withdrawn from the market. It was in the early days of smart pigging,” Hedges said. So while a smart pig was run, he said, “there is no smart pig data associated with the eastern line until we recently ran one in July on the upper section.” How will it be different? Rep. Gabrielle LeDoux, R-Kodiak, wanted to know how BP would do things differently and Marshall said “we are going to have to operate transit lines in a fundamentally different way. As we install new lines we will bring to bear everything we can as a matter of technology: maintenance pigging from day one; smart pigging and ultrasonic testing; and whatever other technology we need to bring to that aspect of our business.”
As to when new procedures would be in place, Marshall said new programs will be in place when the replacement transit lines are installed.
He said BP is also reevaluating its entire corrosion program for the future, asking “is our corrosion management strategy robust for the next 50 years?” That question has only come up in the last few years as the gas line “has become a more likely proposition” and BP has “thought about extending the field life way beyond what we might have expected when I first came here in 1978.” Marshall said the company has kicked off a project to look at maintenance and infrastructure to see if it is “the sensible thing to continue operating the way we are or should we look at alternative ways of doing things.”
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