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North Slope gets new player for spill response Alaska Chadux, with depot at Barrow, offers associate memberships for exploration Kristen Nelson Petroleum News Editor-in-Chief
Alaska Chadux, for 10 years a spill response provider for companies transporting and storing petroleum products in Alaska, is now also providing spill response for North Slope winter exploration projects for newcomers Armstrong Resources and Total. The non-profit oil spill response corporation was formed in 1993 and has grown from four members to 41, including associate members who transport or store petroleum products for their own use, rather than for sale.
Teck Cominco is an example of an associate member, Bob Heavilin, general manager of Alaska Chadux, told Petroleum News. The company stores fuel at Red Dog for use at the mine, not for sale. Companies doing winter exploration on the North Slope would also be associate members, Heavilin said, with Alaska Chadux the primary response action contractor named in their oil spill prevention and contingency plans.
The associate membership option is new to the North Slope, allowing non-producing companies who want to explore for just a few weeks, or months, in a year a lower cost alternative for belonging to a spill response group.
“Cost is a major factor for companies like Armstrong when we’re putting together an exploration program and full-time membership in a spill response group can be cost-prohibitive to new explorers, but Alaska Chadux also places a lot of emphasis on logistics and has an impressive record of timely response,” Stu Gustafson, Armstrong’s vice president of operations, told Petroleum News in early October. Name honors Alaska’s first people “Chadux is an Aleut term. It originally meant whale blubber, and then it evolved into the word meaning fuel — and present-day usage is oil,” Heavilin said.
Chadux was established to provide alternative compliance under the Oil Pollution Act of 1990. The Alaska Department of Environmental Conservation and the U.S. Coast Guard required it to have 10 onshore response depots — hubs, Chadux calls them. They are at Anchorage, Kenai, Kodiak, Valdez, Cordova, Dutch Harbor, Bethel, Naknek, Nome and Barrow.
Regulators required the last hub, on the North Slope, to be in place by July of this year, Heavilin said. Each hub has “equipment to contain a spill, to recover the product and dispose of it.” Immediate response from site Heavilin, formerly state director for the Division of Emergency Services, joined Chadux in 1998. “My whole philosophy on spill response centers around logistics,” he said.
For North Slope exploration that begins at the site: response equipment will be staged at the drill site and workers trained to use it, providing the initial response — and the entire response, in a small spill.
In a larger incident, he said, the people on the ground respond with equipment in place until emergency response labor and additional equipment arrives.
Alaska Chadux has equipment prepackaged to get to a location quickly. Logistics is crucial, Heavilin said: you can have all the equipment in the world and if you can’t get it where it’s needed, you can’t respond. Chadux has letters of intent from a variety of transportation companies that can get that equipment where it needs to go.
Heavy reliance on contractors The non-profit is run by a board of directors representing member companies and employs a staff of eight.
How does an organization with a staff of eight and an annual budget of some $1.5 million respond to spills over a 400,000 square mile area?
In addition to its hubs, it relies heavily on contractors.
For example, Chadux can’t afford to have emergency responders sitting around waiting for a spill, so it works with contractors to develop an emergency response labor force.
Those contractors, like the organization’s hubs, are strategically located around the state.
“We have agreements and contracts and retainers with a wide variety of businesses that operate in Alaska,” Heavilin said.
And it isn’t just a list of names. “We don’t wait to use our contractors … until the balloon goes up,” he said. Chadux works with its contractors in the preparedness stage — which includes “buying equipment, having exercises, doing drills, putting plans together. … It’s all the stuff that you want to do prior to the event, so when the balloon goes up, you’ve got your checklist, you’ve got your equipment prepackaged, and then you go into what you call your response mode.”
Chadux originally sized its prepackaged equipment for large aircraft, Heavilin said, but today it has equipment that will fit in a variety of aircraft — or on trains or in trucks — sized to meet the needs of its varied membership. Keeping the edge Alaska Chadux keeps its edge with a training and exercise schedule which includes drills with regulators and other oil spill response co-ops, Heavilin said.
It also responds to incidents every year.
Bill Schoephoester, one of the founders and formerly president of Alaska Chadux, said the organization had to keep its overhead minimum.
“And we’ve done that by keeping the staff small and maximizing the use of contractors so that we can mobilize rapidly and effectively when we have to, to meet any anticipated size event that we have.”
Not all of those events are small. Chadux responded to the largest spill in Alaska since the Exxon Valdez, Schoephoester said, the M/V Kuroshima spill in Dutch Harbor in 1997. It was called out on Thanksgiving eve. While Alaska Chadux had equipment at its Dutch Harbor hub, Schoephoester said, it was not enough to handle that spill.
So it mobilized equipment prepared for just such an event.
“We had the first C-130 full of response equipment out there at daylight … Thanksgiving day.” By the time it de-mobilized at Christmas, Chadux had put some 100 responders on the ground and spent around $3.5 million.
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