Majority of oil gone from Drift River terminal

Alan Bailey

Petroleum News

In a second drawdown of the contents of the active storage tanks at the Drift River oil terminal, at the base of the erupting Redoubt Volcano on the west side of Alaska’s Cook Inlet, the Chevron-flagged tanker Mississippi Voyager has successfully removed about 5.4 million gallons of the 6.2 million gallons of crude oil that remained in the tanks. The tanker departed the terminal’s Christy Lee platform at 6:30 a.m. April 30, bound for a refinery in Hawaii, after ballasting the terminal tanks with more than 5 million gallons of freshwater that the tanker had carried from the Columbia River, the U.S. Coast Guard said.

In early April after explosions from the volcano had caused the Drift River adjacent the terminal to flood, carrying mudflows against the terminal’s protective dike and across the facility’s airstrip, the unified command for responding to the threat to the terminal decided to shut-in the terminal and unload as much oil as possible from the tanks, to prevent oil leaking into Cook Inlet were a tank to be ruptured.

“We have effectively removed the majority of the oil at the facility,” said Gary Folley, state on-scene coordinator, following completion of the second drawdown operation on April 30. “Thus we have significantly reduced the potential threat to Cook Inlet.”

“The tanker was accompanied by the tug Vigilant,” said Captain Mark Hamilton, federal on-scene coordinator. “The bridge of the tanker was manned 24 hours a day and the engines remained on standby at all times during the transfer.”

An initial drawdown of oil by the tanker Seabulk Arctic on April 6 had removed as much oil as possible from the tanks, given the heights of the pump intakes above the tank bottoms. The tanker had then pumped seawater into the tanks as ballast. Removing more oil in the second drawdown involved using propellers to mix the remaining oil and sludge with the ballast water, and then pumping as much as possible of the resulting mixture out of the tanks. Removing any further oil and sludge will involve a lengthy cleaning process, said Rod Ficken, vice president Cook Inlet Pipe Line Co, the company that owns the terminal.

“Once the volcano is determined to be dormant and we can put people safely on the ground for an extended period of time we will use vacuum trucks and hand methods to thoroughly clean the tanks,” Ficken said.

Meantime teams have been cleaning and repairing the Drift River terminal facilities and have cleared about 3,000 feet of the airstrip. All oil wells on the west side of the Cook Inlet have been shut-in since April 5 as a consequence of the terminal shutdown — Cook Inlet Pipe Line is working with the oil producers to assess options for future operation of the terminal, USCG said.

As of May 7, the Redoubt Volcano eruption continued, with the ongoing possibility of another explosion.