Sidebar 2: Four modes of transportation at Northstar

Kristen Nelson

Petroleum News

people and drilling supplies out to the island is a challenge. “At Northstar we go through four major modes of transportation each year,” BP’s Fritz Gunkel told PNA. BP is just getting ready to go into crew boat and barge operation, which will run from the end of July to October.

The boats and barges, Gunkel said, are “an efficient way to get to and from the island.”

When ice starts to develop bearing capacity in the fall, the company starts using a Hagglund, tracked vehicle that “looks like an armored personnel carrier without the armor,” Gunkel said. The Hagglund is used both to carry people - the capacity is 11 - or freight. Between the boats and the Hagglunds are helicopters, two Bell 212s.

Northstar is the only helicopter operation on the North Slope moving people to work over water, so that means survival suits for the 10-minute flight to the island. “Takes you longer to get in and out of your survival suit than it does to fly,” Gunkel said.

From February to June Northstar is reached by ice road. “And that’s when Northstar looks most like the rest of the North Slope operations,” he said, is when the seven-mile ice road is in place.

The two major periods of resupply are in summer by barge and in winter by ice road. And then there is storage. Northstar is “the busiest five acres on the North Slope,” Gunkel said, and storage is at a premium, with drilling supplies laid out in front of the rig.

“This rig is like a big Pac-Man,” he said: “It kind of has to gobble supplies up ahead of it so it can move down the well row.”