|
ExxonMobil in Alaska: TAPS revisited in 1984 Exxon’s in-house magazine looks back at trans-Alaska oil pipeline construction, politics, impact Walter K. Wilson The Lamp, Fall 1984 (This is an abbreviated version.) Passengers on cruise ships calling at Valdez on Alaska’s south coast this summer may have caught a glimpse of sea otters in the bay as the oil tanker was maneuvered to a loading dock of the Alyeska Pipeline Service Company marine terminal. Ashore, a travel agency offered bus tours to the terminal — six miles around the bay from downtown Valdez — and north along the Richardson Highway to points where elevated sections of the 48-inch, 800-mile pipeline can be viewed from the roadside.
One of the state’s prime tourist attractions … the Trans Alaska Pipeline System (TAPS) has now been operating for seven years. Each 24-hour day, roughly 1.7 million barrels of oil from Alaska’s North Slope are pumped through the line. …
Ten years ago the huge construction project that was ultimately to transform Alaska’s economy was just getting under way. Six years earlier, in the summer of 1968, a well drilled jointly by … [Atlantic Richfield and Humble Oil, part of Exxon] had confirmed the existence of the largest reservoir of crude oil ever found in the U.S. The field, at Prudhoe Bay, 250 miles south of the Arctic Circle on the shores of the Beaufort Sea, had recoverable reserves estimated at 9.6 billion barrels.
Within a year, plans were announced for a Trans Alaska Pipeline. Alyeska Pipeline Service Company was formed on August 14, 1970, to handle its design, construction, operation and maintenance.
Construction could not start until the U.S. Department of the Interior (DOI) issued a permit allowing Alyeska to proceed. Before this could happen, the TAPS owners were required to show DOI they could build the pipeline without undue impact on the environment. … DOI held public hearings in 1971, and amassed 37 volumes of testimony from oil company representatives and others.
Pipeline faced opposition The project faced stiff opposition from environmental groups and others who, in April 1970, filed suit to prevent construction. Their overriding fear was that building the pipeline would open vast wilderness areas to development. They were concerned with the impact of the proposed pipeline on fish, birds and migrating animals, such as the caribou. They were also apprehensive about the possibility of oil spills, disturbance of the permafrost … and problems of erosion.
DOI prepared a comprehensive, nine-volume environmental impact statement which concluded that with proper construction and operation, the pipeline could be built with minimum risk to the environment.
Nevertheless, the environmental suits lingered in the courts. Finally, following the start of the Arab oil embargo in 1973, Congress passed special legislation to resolve the impasse and in November 1973, President Nixon signed a measure authorizing construction of the … pipeline. In January of 1974, Secretary of the Interior Rogers Morton gave his approval. A month later, Alyeska began awarding contracts and construction began in April.
Price tag $9 billion Costing $9 billion to complete, TAPS was constructed with 420 miles of pipe above ground, and 380 miles buried underground where the soil is more stable. The pipeline crosses 44 roads, some 835 rivers and streams, and three mountain ranges — rising to its highest elevation at the 4,700-foot Atigun Pass of the rugged Brooks Range. Its construction required nearly 1,350 federal, state and local technical permits.
In addition to installing the 800 miles of pipe, crews built a 360-mile, all-weather highway from the Yukon River to Prudhoe Bay, eight pump stations, a pressure relief station, and the marine terminal at Valdez. …
Meanwhile, the State of Alaska constructed the 2,300-foot E.L. Patton Bridge over the Yukon River (named for the Exxon engineer who was Alyeska’s president during design and construction of the pipeline.)
More than 70,000 men and women were involved in the pipeline project at one time or another during construction. Work proceeded around the clock, sometimes in temperatures as low as minus 60 degrees Fahrenheit, in winds that dropped the chill factor to minus 115 degrees Fahrenheit — and through the short but broiling summers that brought out great clouds of Alaska’s infamous mosquitoes.
Start-up June 1977 With the start-up of TAPS on June 20, 1977, Alyeska moved from its role in managing the largest privately financed construction project in history to operating the engineering marvel it had wrought.
Frank G. Turpin, vice president of Exxon Research and Engineering Company, became Alyeska’s president in 1978. “Most companies tend to build up slowly,” he observed recently. “We found ourselves almost overnight operating a $9 billion investment.” …
In the 1980s, Turpin says, the emphasis has been on increasing the efficiency of TAPS by reducing the cost of its operation. Throughput has increased from 700,000 barrels daily in the early stages of operation to nearly 1.7 million barrels a day this year. At the same time, operating costs have fallen from $250 million in the first full year of operation (1978) to around $200 million this year. The roster of 1,900 employees in 1978 now stands at just under 1,000 men and women.
Further efficiencies will be made possible by a new $12 million supervisory control and data acquisition computer to be installed at the Valdez operations center by the end of this year. The new system will enable pipeline controllers located at Valdez to obtain much more information faster.
The computer is also designed to monitor injection of the Drag Reducing Agent (DRA), a substance that has been a basic part of TAPS operation since 1979, About 5,000 gallons of the DRA are injected daily into the pipeline. By improving the pump ability of the crude oil, DRA substantially increases the throughput of the system.
McPhee: humbling perspective The immensity of Alaska brings a humbling perspective to any human project or endeavor in the state. In his 1978 book, “Coming Into the Country,” John McPhee wrote: “The celebrated Trans Alaska Pipeline is, in scale, comparable to a thread laid across Staten Island.” And Alyeska’s Frank Turpin notes that the pipeline’s right of way and related facilities occupy a mere 14.28 square miles of Alaska’s 568,412 square miles. …
Alaska is currently celebrating the 25th anniversary of its statehood with considerably higher expectations than attended its entry into the Union — thanks in large part to the economic benefits that have flowed from the development of its petroleum resources. …
But the outlook wasn’t quite as optimistic in 1969 when a major legal obstacle to TAPS construction was a freeze on virtually all Alaskan land transactions because of land claims of Alaskans. That hurdle was removed in 1971 when Congress passed the Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act.
This legislation provided 40 million acres of land and $962.5 million as compensation for the land claims of Native Alaskans. …
The act also established 12 regional corporations to administer the land and organize profit making ventures for the benefit of Native people.
Cook Inlet Region Inc. (CIRI), of which Roy M. Huhndorf has been president since 1975, is the most profitable of the regional corporations. With about 6,500 shareholders and close to 2.5 million acres of land centered on the Cook Inlet basin, the corporation early defined its basic businesses as natural resource development — coal, oil, minerals and real estate, with some selective involvement in oil-related service industries. …
CIRI has also been involved in a number of land exchanges with the state and federal governments — trading CIRI land which the government wants to preserve for environmental purposes for equivalent-size tracts that CIRI can put to economic use. In one such exchange, CIRI acquired Camp Lonely, an old Distant Early Warning line facility in northern Alaska. CIRI hopes to manage the camp as a service and support base for further oil exploration in the Beaufort Sea.
Says Huhndorf: “About a third of our revenues come from royalties and other participations in oil and gas development. An additional third is generated from services performed mainly at Prudhoe Bay, with the final third coming from a combination of interests and real estate developments. Without question, the high level of economic opportunity here today is largely driven by what oil companies have been doing in our state for 20 years.”
One basic concern for Alaska’s Native population is that their cultural heritage and way of life not be sacrificed as a result of resource development programs, says Huhndorf. Many of them have entered the cash economy and want jobs and training, but many also fear the impact that mining and oil development might have on fish and marine mammals and on land animals in areas around their villages. …
Long before the first gravel was moved for the construction of the haul road that runs along the pipeline, or the first section of pipe was installed, extensive studies and tests were made of the terrain, flora and wildlife along the pipeline’s proposed right of way. Scientists and engineers analyzed the geology and climatic factors along this corridor. They considered resource and environmental risks, developed re-vegetation programs, and recommended appropriate equipment and materials to be used in construction and operation of the line. Along with federal and state wildlife advisors and archeologists, they surveyed every foot of the 800-mile right of way to take into account such ecological features as animal migration zones, fish spawning streams, animal dens, feeding and nesting areas, as well as archaeological sites.
In the summer of 1984, after seven years of harmonious coexistence of the pipeline system with Alaska’s complex terrain, flora and teeming wildlife, the environmental issue no longer incites much passion or controversy.
Ben L. Hilliker left Alaska’s Fish and Game Department in 1972 to join Alyeska as biological coordinator. He is now that company’s manager for environmental protection and government reports. Says Hilliker: “It was a large question mark in many peoples’ minds in those days: could we in fact build the pipeline without causing irreparable damage to the tundra or the permafrost? What effect would it have on the moose and caribou passages and on Dall sheep (a species of white-coated sheep found wild in the mountains of Alaska and northern Canada) at lambing time? What impact would the pipeline’s stream and river crossings have on fish spawning and passage?
“We had to take those issues one at a time, work with federal and state regulators and environmental experts to resolve them and then, during construction, demonstrate that Alyeska was doing what it said it would do. It was a learning process on all sides.” …
Hilliker notes that the caribou and moose populations have actually increased, and neither of these species seems afraid to pass under the elevated pipeline. The Dall sheep population is as high as it was before the line was built, perhaps higher. …
In 1984, … [Exxon’s] experts are still as busy — and as optimistic — as ever. This year, the company’s drilling rigs are active in the Beaufort Sea, in Norton Sound and in the Bering Sea.
For Exxon, and all other oil companies operating there, Alaska’s frontiers remain new and bright with promise.
| 