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Needed: Roads, bridges and ports Pearce: As much as $1.5 billion in infrastructure work will be needed in Alaska before North Slope gas pipeline can be built Kristen Nelson Petroleum News Editor-in-Chief
There’s been a lot of discussion around the huge investment, up to $20 billion, needed to build a pipeline to deliver Alaska North Slope natural gas to markets in the Lower 48.
“The project is unprecedented in size and scope,” Drue Pearce of the Department of the Interior told the American Conference Institute’s “Alaska Oil & Gas” conference in Anchorage Sept. 19.
But, said Pearce, senior advisor to the secretary of the Interior for Alaska affairs, one thing that doesn’t get discussed much at meetings about the gas pipeline is infrastructure, the “roads and bridges and ports” that will have to handle the pipe.
Before the project can even be built, she said, infrastructure work will need to be done. Roads, bridges on the route of the Alaska Railroad and even some ports will need work “in order to handle these huge pipes … and all the other pieces and parts that are going to have to come north for this pipeline.” Twice the weight of pipe Wes Watkins, pipeline practice director for Michael Baker Jr., an engineer who worked on the trans-Alaska pipeline, provided some specifics: The 52-inch pipe, he said, weighs about twice as much per foot as the 48-inch TAPS line. “When you saw a TAPS truck, it had three pieces of pipe on it. Today, under the current road restrictions, there’s one joint of 52-inch equivalent. … That’s a huge consideration because you’re talking about two to three times” the number of trips to move the pipe, he said.
A comparison of the magnitude of TAPS to the Alaska portion of a North Slope gas pipeline into Canada is about right, Watkins said, since “the piece in Alaska is almost identical in length to the piece that was done for TAPS.”
Watkins said there are “bridges that don’t have the right clearances, we’re talking about highways on this project that weren’t used during TAPS — they’re going to have to have work done on them.”
Then there’s the Haul Road running north to Prudhoe Bay.
It’s now used to support North Slope oil and gas work, to support TAPS, it also carries tourists, and with the gas pipeline project it will have to support another mega-project. Cost of pre-build construction In addition to road, bridge and port work, Pearce said, “those construction camps for TAPS are gone. They’re going to have to be reconstructed.”
This pre-build construction work has been estimated at between $500 million and $1.5 billion, she said. “Now let me tell you that those numbers are not in the estimates you see when the producers talk about the cost of the pipeline. They’re also not in the Transportation Act that Congress passed last year.” And they’re not, Pearce said, in the works for federal funding.
“So the question is: who will pay, and when, and when are those pre-builds going to start?
“Because you can’t put that pipe in the ground if you can’t get it to the location and you cannot get it to the location over our present railroads and our highways, because the bridges won’t handle it, the roadbeds won’t handle it.”
Watkins concurred on the scheduling issue: the infrastructure work “needs to be complete before the construction activity (on the pipeline) begins, so we’ve got these resources in place so when the pipe gets to a port, the pipe gets on the railroad, the pipe gets on a truck, and it can move.”
There’s another scheduling issue, he said: “the majority of this kind of work, these upgrades to infrastructure” and replacements of infrastructure have to be done in the summer. And “we have a short construction season here.”
Pearce said Interior has been working with the state on infrastructure issues and Watkins said the state Department of Transportation and Public Facilities is “trying to get a handle on how big a project” the pre-build will be.
“This will be a project in itself just getting the infrastructure upgrades,” he said.
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