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40 Years at Prudhoe Bay: Oilfield veteran led construction Prudhoe Bay’s first North Slope coordinator remembers challenges of building field’s petroleum production, processing facilities Rose Ragsdale For Petroleum News
When Atlantic Richfield Co. took on the task of building production facilities to process the billions of barrels of oil it discovered at Prudhoe Bay, the Los Angeles-based major set out to recruit the best facilities engineers it could find.
That search brought to the company’s attention Landon Kelly, an oilfield services veteran who had left ARCO a few years earlier to run his own consulting business in the Rocky Mountains before joining a partner to design and build offshore platforms in Cook Inlet.
Kelly reported for duty at North America’s largest oil field in January 1969, just six months after the Prudhoe Bay discovery had been confirmed. Though he had spent 20 years drilling oil wells and building and operating oil-field production and distribution facilities from Canada to the Gulf of Mexico, Kelly had zero experience working in the Arctic, one of the harshest and most remote environments in the world.
“I was one of the first operating guys up there for ARCO,” the Anchorage resident recalled recently.
One of two production engineers who shared the job of North Slope coordinator, Kelly was charged with ensuring that all of the varied drilling, production and construction activities under way in the eastern half of the field ran smoothly.
In that position, Kelly said he watched a functioning oil field, day by day, rise from the tundra and inch closer to startup.
“If anybody had a problem, they’d let me know about it, whether it was injuries or bears, whatever,” Kelly said.
Experience and common sense This responsibility sometimes led to dramatic confrontations, he said.
For example, when a worker was seriously injured, Kelly waylaid a commercial airplane sitting on the ground at the Sagwon airport and asked the pilot to delay takeoff so the plane could transport the injured man to the hospital in Fairbanks.
“I asked the pilot to wait and he said, ‘No.’ Well, I parked a bulldozer in front of the plane,” Kelly recalled. “The pilot threatened to call the police, and I told him to get after it.”
Five minutes after the standoff began, it was over. Emergency workers trundled the injured man aboard the plane and the aircraft took off.
Life on the Slope in those days, before the oil producers and contractors established formal policies and procedures, was full of instances where Kelly had to make snap decisions based on his judgment and common sense.
Kelly said he watched ARCO build a topping plant early on because the company knew it had a big field that would have a considerable thirst for fuel.
He said he also helped with construction of a pipeline test loop, which gathered data that ultimately affected the design of the trans-Alaska oil pipeline.
“We found that a core of oil would move through the lines with friction and that we could keep the oil moving even in the coldest temperatures,” Kelly said.
He said this early period was dominated by politics, and it took ARCO four years to secure an operating permit for the field’s processing facilities.
But by the time ARCO won the permit, the module that engineers had originally designed for the field’s flow stations seemed inadequate.
“By that time, we had quite a bit more information, so we made the decision to start over,” Kelly said.
The coordinator was asked to help with module design and selection of equipment.
“We started from scratch working with a design team in Los Angeles,” Kelly recalled. “As we developed the design, we would make sure we could operate it safely and efficiently and that we could maintain it.”
This process led to a rather unusual arrangement in which Kelly commuted between the North Slope and Los Angeles for three years.
“I’d spend all week in Los Angeles, come home on Fridays and meet with the operations people — the president of ARCO Alaska Inc., the head of engineering and the engineering staff,” Kelly said. “When I returned to LA on Monday, I would have a pocket full of decisions.”
Attention to detail In this manner, ARCO worked its way through design, construction and commissioning of its production facilities.
During the construction phase, Kelly said he asked the operations staff to work at night, fine-tuning and testing the processing facilities while the construction workers slept.
“Every night, between 10 p.m. and 2 a.m., I’d go ‘piddlin’,” Kelly said.
“Piddlin” was Kelly’s word for walking around the facilities, casually observing and visiting with operations staff while they were working.
He said the practice paid off when ARCO’s production facilities did not miss a beat at startup in 1977, and “unlike, the other side of the field, was able to supply its full quota of output to Pump Station 1 of the trans-Alaska oil pipeline from Day 1 without interruption.”
Once Prudhoe Bay was up and running, ARCO invited Kelly to bring the expertise he’d acquired to bear on the company’s next North Slope challenge, designing and building production facilities for the Kuparuk River field, North America’s second-largest oil field.
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