Drift River terminal restarting operations

Following successful modifications to the Drift River Oil Terminal on the west side of Alaska’s Cook Inlet, to bypass the terminal’s storage tanks and thus allow oil to flow directly from the Cook Inlet pipeline into tankers calling at the terminal’s Christy Lee offshore platform, the tanker Overseas Boston arrived at the platform Aug. 4 to enable oil loading operations at the terminal to restart, according a situation report issued Aug. 5 by the Alaska Department of Environmental Conservation.

The terminal, and with it several west Cook Inlet oil fields, have been shut-in since early April as a consequence of the threat to the terminal posed by the eruption of the neighboring Redoubt Volcano. But, with volcanic activity subsiding, terminal operator Cook Inlet Pipe Line decided in mid-July to restart terminal operations, albeit without taking the risk of storing any oil in the Drift River storage tanks.

The Overseas Boston is initially offloading some remaining waste oil and water from the storage tanks, before loading fresh oil through the Cook Inlet pipeline from production facilities on the west side of Cook Inlet — storage tanks at those facilities will perform a similar function to that of the shut-in storage tanks at Drift River, enabling oil field production to continue between tanker offloads at the terminal.

Following this initial offload by the Overseas Boston, the tanker will deliver the fresh oil to the Tesoro refinery in Nikiski on the Kenai Peninsula, and the waste oil and water to Emerald Services in Washington state, DEC said.

All regulatory approvals required to restart the terminal have been obtained, including approval of some required minor amendments to the terminal’s oil discharge prevention and contingency plan, DEC said.

The unified command that has been overseeing the response to the Redoubt Volcano’s threat to the Drift River terminal has been stood down, but can be re-activated at any time were eruptive activity at Redoubt to recommence.

—Alan Bailey