Second tanker reduces crude in storage

Richard Mauer

Anchorage Daily News

Chevron brought another tanker to the Drift River oil terminal April 28 to continue efforts to reduce the amount of crude oil stored in the shadow of Redoubt volcano.

Chevron’s Mississippi Voyager tied up at the Christy Lee platform about 9:30 a.m., the offshore loading dock for Drift River, and is expected to remain there about 48 hours, said Petty Officer Sara Francis, spokeswoman for the Coast Guard. The tanker will take on an emulsion of crude, saltwater and sludge and deliver it to a Lower 48 plant capable of separating them, she said.

The Mississippi Voyager is the second tanker to dock there since Redoubt began erupting March 22.

Though the volcano hasn’t exploded since April 4, it remains in an eruption phase and could deliver a blast at any time, scientists say. That poses a threat for the Drift River terminal, owned by Cook Inlet Pipe Line Co., a Chevron-operated company.

An explosion risks melting the glaciers that feed into Drift River, flooding it with ice, water and mud and threatening the terminal.

Two such floods, known by the Indonesian word “lahar,” have gushed down the river since March, but a dike built in 1990 protected the terminal’s tanks. The airstrip at the facility, which lies outside the dike, was flooded. Workers have cleared the mud from about 300 feet of the field, enough to bring in a load of fuel for the diesel generators there, Francis said.

About 6.2 million gallons of crude were in two active tanks when the volcano first exploded. The eruption forced the evacuation of terminal staff and a shut-down of its operations. In a lull earlier this month, a tanker picked up 3.7 million gallons, but couldn’t drain the tanks because their pump intakes sit several feet off the bottom to avoid sucking up heavy sludge.

With as much oil removed as installed equipment allowed, the tanks were backfilled with 840,000 gallons of seawater to anchor them better in the event of a flood.

The intakes have not been modified, Francis said, but over the next day or two, two-foot propellers in the bottom of the tanks will stir up the mixture and suspend as much of the oil and sludge in the water as possible, like a food processor making mousse. The mixture will then be pumped from one tank to the other, further agitating the mix, before it’s sucked out.

The pumps will run until they suck air, Francis said. At that point, Cook Inlet Pipe Line will take samples from the bottom of the tank to determine how much oil is left. Then the Mississippi Voyager will unload a cargo of freshwater from the Columbia River back into the tanks, once again weighing them down against the threat of flood.

The long-term future of the terminal remains an open question, officials said. Chevron has been forced to suspend petroleum production at its platforms in Cook Inlet because there’s no place to store the oil, though gas production continues normally, Chevron spokeswoman Roxanne Sinz said.

No Chevron workers have been furloughed, she said, though some contractors have lost work.