North of the Yukon, the pipeline traverses broad, barren lands, much like I-80 across Wyoming. Nearing the big river, the pipeline meanders through increasingly green forests, whose tall aspens evoke Colorado high country. Over the big river, the pipeline hangs from a bridge. For a hundred miles, as the pipeline nears Fairbanks, it snakes through rolling forested hills. Through all of this terrain, crews tracked the pig for six days. Neogi (back in Anchorage again) got updates. Then, as the pig slid into town, he flew up to Fairbanks.
Neogi showed up on an abnormally warm day wearing a silky green shirt that went incongruously with his brown pants, and no belt. He was, though, wearing a big, shiny watch. He seemed hurried, pushy—perhaps frazzled from the flight. He doesn’t like flying. He still hadn’t heard the pig go by.
He took his team out for lunch at his favorite Thai restaurant. There Neogi asked Wasson if he’d seen a news clip about the spill on Exxon-Mobil’s Pegasus pipeline. Three days before, while the pig was at mile 325, the Pegasus pipeline leaked five thousand barrels in Mayflower, Arkansas. Eleven days before that, a Chevron pipeline in Utah leaked six hundred barrels. Neogi pays close attention to incidents on other pipelines. Since 2006, he’s been on the piping code committee of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers. As such, he hears about pipeline accidents in Australia, Russia, India—where intervention criteria are much laxer. I asked him about the ramifications of the spill.
“You know, my ultimate job is to stop a leak,” he said. “So it’s good news if it didn’t happen to us. It will bring more attention, more money, more technical development toward what we do. I wish it didn’t have to come from a leak on a pipe, but that’s the way it is.” Then he said that it’d be a headache to do the root-cause analysis of the failure and make sure that Alyeska was not exposed to the same threat.
At the table, Neogi pulled up a video on his phone and passed it around. It was a clip of a superhydrophobic paint shedding water like a penguin. He said he wanted to test the stuff on Alyeska’s pigs to see if it will prevent wax buildup and make cleaning them easier. He would like to do this by 2016, when the next smart pig will be run. Neogi had come to town to check in with his team, and in the way of support, he brought up some other pig-related modifications he wanted to make too. On Thompson Pass, he’d like to replace some of the pipe with thicker stuff, so that he can tightline the section. Or he’d like to install some new valves. He hadn’t landed on a precise fix yet, but he was thinking about one. It will probably cost many millions. By then, Alyeska may be monitoring the pipeline with drones. But preventing a leak is still preferable to discovering one. What he was looking forward to most is the installation of a new pig launcher and receiver at Pump 9. The $30 million project is slated for 2015. The new facility would allow Neogi to do the pig run in three sections instead of two. His crews would be able to get more rest. As such, this mother of all pig runs was the last.
As the pig headed through Fairbanks, Alyeska’s public relations team was ready. Often during pig runs, a rumor of a spill emerges, spurred by the flurry of Alyeska trucks running around at all hours. Phone calls and a blurb in the Fairbanks Daily News-Miner usually set things straight. This time, the pig clambered by unnoticed.
“The public has low tolerance for pipeline failures,” Neogi said later. He pointed out that over a hundred people a day die in car accidents—few ever making national news—but when one person dies in a pipeline accident, we get hearings in Washington. Two days before the Pegasus spill, fourteen cars of a freight train derailed in Minnesota and spilled four hundred barrels of oil—and earned much smaller headlines. Neogi said, “No other department has our kind of accountability. A leak is easily a billion dollars.” Actually, a leak could be five times that. “If I fail, the company’s looking at over a billion dollars in problems: image, cleanup costs, respect in Alaska.” He said, “If I don’t do my job right, if I sleep on the job, it impacts the state, the owners, the industry, future drilling.” To all concerned with the integrity of the Trans-Alaska Pipeline, that last part is a grave concern.
As the flow of oil through TAPS decreases, pigging will become drastically more difficult. Below 400,000 barrels per day, it will become impossible to tightline Atigun Pass, because there’s only so much oil a controller can store in the tanks at Pump 1 before he runs out of emergency wiggle room. By then, the slack section on Atigun Pass will be over three miles long. Below 350,000 barrels per day, the “slippage factor” of a cleaning pig will prevent it from scraping the line effectively. With the bypass necessary to keep the wax ahead of it in a slurry, there won’t be enough force to push the pig forward. Alyeska will also need to run them more frequently—as frequently as during this run’s cleaning regimen—and this makes controllers nervous.
Meanwhile, by 2015, the small percentage of water entrained in the oil will drop out and begin flowing in a separate layer on the bottom of the line. Collecting at a dozen low spots, it could freeze. In so doing, it could disable check valves or halt pigs. At a flow rate of 400,000 barrels per day (expected by 2020), a pig arriving in Valdez could be pushing a slug of water one third of a mile long. Alyeska may need a new type of pig to push out the water, because water will also corrode the pipeline. Compounding matters, lower throughput will make it harder for controllers to detect leaks. But that’s still not the worst of it.
At 8:16 a.m. on January 8, 2011, an employee at Pump 1 discovered oil in the basement of the booster pump building. It wasn’t much, but it was coming from a pipe encased in concrete, which made fixing it, let alone assessing it, difficult. Alyeska shut down the pipeline and directed more than two hundred people to Prudhoe Bay to work on the problem pronto. A day passed. A second day passed, as did a third—and still the pipeline remained shut down.
As half of Alyeska’s employees worked on the problem, many of them around the clock, the oil in the line running across the state cooled rapidly. The high temperature outside was very low. Like travelers stranded at airports, two cleaning pigs were trapped in the line: one near Fairbanks, and one at Thompson Pass. On the fourth day, with a repair still days away, Alyeska sought permission from PHMSA to temporarily restart the line. PHMSA granted the request. Alyeska restarted the line to stymie ice formation and wax deposition downstream of the pigs, because ice and wax could lead to cascading, devastating results. The pig near Fairbanks was safely trapped seventy miles south, between valves at Pump 8. The pig at Thompson Pass was trapped in Valdez and pulled out. Three days after the temporary restart, a week after Alyeska first shut down the line, engineers bypassed the leaky pipe and restarted the line for good. The operator who started it up remembers it clearly. She says it was the closest that TAPS had ever been to becoming an eight-hundred-mile-long Popsicle.
This is Alyeska’s great fear, its “worst-case event.” Declining throughput may necessitate frequent cleaning pigs, complex operating procedures, smarter and tougher pigs, and increased maintenance—but these are nothing compared with the seizure of the pipeline. North Slope crude gels at 15 degrees. It gets so thick that pumps can’t push it. It becomes thixotropic, like quicksand. For whatever reason—a power outage, say—if the oil sits in the line too long, at the wrong time of year, the threat of the big Popsicle looms. In January 2011, the oil cooled to 25 degrees. The threat is critical. Alyeska’s former president told Congress that at the flow rate expected in 2015, nine winter days of shutdown could spell the ultimate end of the pipeline. If the oil gels, there will be no recovering from it. The threat makes explosions and even leaks seem trivial. It’s a game ender.
It’s because of this conundrum that drilling in the Beaufort and Chukchi Seas is of such importance to Alaska, Alyeska, and Alaskans. Those rigs will tie into the Alaska pipeline, feed it their oil. Sure, residents will get annual dividends, and Alaska will receive billions in royalties and taxes that fund pretty much everything in the state. But it’s the long-term future of the state on the table. The sooner that someone turns around the two-decade
saga of declining throughput, keeping the pipeline from turning into a giant Popsicle, the easier those concerned with the integrity of the pipe will sleep.
In the meantime, if TAPS leaks for some reason, and the public withholds forgiveness, the resultant delay in offshore drilling could portend the end of the line. That’s what Neogi was implying when he mentioned the impact on future drilling. A big spill could delay offshore drilling in the Beaufort or Chukchi Seas for two decades, and this could spell the end of the line. End of the line would be the end of the state of Alaska, and not exactly beneficial to the economy of the other forty-nine states in the union. Precarious is the future of the pipeline, and high are the stakes in which Neogi and the integrity management crew operate.
On the day before the pig left Pump Station 1, Secretary of the Interior Ken Salazar said that Shell “screwed up” in its attempt to explore off the northern coast of Alaska in 2012. While the pig was at Pump 4, Shell’s offshore rig, the Kulluk, was secured for its journey across the Pacific Ocean to be repaired. Before the pig left Pump 4, Alaska’s state senate voted 11 to 9 to cut taxes on the oil industry—billions over the next decade—to make future production more attractive. Without giving it away for free, the senators made the North Slope a more desirable place to drill. The subtext of all of it was the integrity of the Trans-Alaska Pipeline, without which nobody would have any way to get the oil.
Alyeska used to be shy about the challenges it faced. Now it’s revealing them like battle scars, telling its stories to anyone who will listen. The company is asking for sympathy, understanding, and help. The CEO granted me unprecedented access. During my visit, he met with the News-Miner to talk about the declining throughput problem, mentioning a new “very low flow” study. The company’s low-flow study is already posted on its website. Presenting to a DC think tank, he employed a creative analogy. Flow rates below seven hundred thousand barrels per day he compared with a “dipstick below the add-oil line.” Everyone knows better than to drive a car with no oil. The rate hasn’t been above seven hundred thousand barrels per day for years.
Every Alyeska employee—whether he or she prefers Rachel Maddow to Bill O’Reilly—wants more oil production. Federal regulators in Alaska feel the same way: they’re not pipeline foes, and certainly not oil foes, and they aren’t recalcitrant regarding this bias. They’re pipeline boosters, tending to it and rooting for it so long as its operator adheres to minimum standards. All worry that Russian oil companies will get offshore in the Arctic before US companies do, and resent that politicians are stopping them from sinking wells in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, below which there’s enough oil to triple the throughput of the pipeline for a generation. At least one regulator wasn’t sure if the pipeline would be around when I’m old enough to collect Social Security. Todd Church, the manager of the operators in the unmarked concrete Anchorage building, said he foresaw the challenges of declining throughput when he accepted his job but figured there was enough oil to last his career.
Until Alyeska gets more oil, it’s preparing for the worst. During the January 2011 shutdown, Pump Station 7 came to the rescue by heating the oil in the line. Now Alyeska wants to add heat to the line, at great expense, at four more pump stations. The company would like to install more insulation on sections of elevated pipe. It would like as much oil as it can possibly get from ConocoPhillips’s new Alpine fields, and not long ago, it looked at blending crude with liquefied gas, of which there’s plenty (thirty-eight trillion cubic feet) under the Slope. The authors of a study on the subject, from the Petroleum Development Laboratory, in Fairbanks, found that adding liquefied gas to crude raised the wax appearance temperature, and that the addition of liquefied gas disrupted the stability of crude, promoting significant amounts of asphaltene precipitation and deposition. Covering the walls of the pipe with wax was one thing; covering it with asphalt was another. Asphalt was “very undesirable,” and though the authors never explicitly said why, the reason ought to now be clear. They figured the next thing to do was study the addition of asphaltene-stabilizing chemicals.
Alyeska employees insist that the real question is not mechanical (How low can the flow get?) but financial (When will the producers decide it’s not worth it to keep drilling on the North Slope?). Instead of throwing money at the challenges before them, the producers will seek opportunities elsewhere. Their financial obligations are to their shareholders, after all. Until then, the newest financial twist in Alaska’s petro-colonial soap opera is the state’s latest lawsuit against Alyeska. The state objects to the billion-plus dollars that Alyeska has spent on “strategic reconfiguration,” which is jargon for low-flow modifications. As always, every dollar spent on the line is a dollar not going into Alaska’s coffers. The way Alyeska sees it, there’d be no more pipeline if it weren’t for those modifications. The weeklong shutdown in January 2011 would have been the final blow.
MILE 549
South of Fairbanks, conditions were so good, and the access roads to the pipeline so well plowed, that the crews tracking the pig didn’t need snow-cats. Trucks sufficed. In North Pole, where the pipeline passes beneath a suburban development, tracking the pig was downright casual. Across from a small ranch house, Ben Wasson parked on a snowy road, and after setting up the geophone, he hung out in the road with the truck door open. A resident in a pink fleece jacket and a wool hat walked by with a golden retriever. Had her dog pooped right then, Wasson would have heard it on the radio. Over the next week, Wasson found himself coasting. His updates to Neogi and executives at Alyeska became carbon copies: “Tracking continues day and night . . . OCC continues to provide excellent support.”
Near mile 500, where the pipeline wanders far from any road, tracking crews gave up. As a result, for a half day, nobody knew where the smart pig was. Everyone hoped it wasn’t stuck. It was the day after April Fools’ Day. The pig was fine.
By the time the smart pig was at mile 549, it was only nine hours behind the urethane cleaning pig. Engineers in Valdez wanted more wiggle room between the two pigs, because in January 2000 they learned the hard way that the pig trap there was not capable of receiving two pigs concurrently. The second pig was forced into an eighteen-inch line, as if made of Play-Doh. Engineers in Valdez also didn’t want the smart pig jetting down Thompson Pass just as the cleaning pig arrived in Valdez, because a pressure wave, they feared, could trigger the relief valves and lead to the ingestion of the cleaning pig. So they decided to put eighteen hours between them. That meant holding the smart pig at Pump Station 9 for a half day. This scrambled Wasson’s schedule and didn’t thrill Neogi. In that larger window, he feared, the likelihood of wax buildup was greater. He hoped it wouldn’t make a difference.
While the pig waited at Pump 9, twenty cars of a freight train in Ontario derailed and spilled four hundred barrels of oil. In San Francisco, opponents of the Keystone XL pipeline chanted, “When I say pipeline, you say kill! Pipeline! Kill! Pipeline! Kill!” In Alaska, such language would get you knocked out and left for a grizzly snack.
Two days later, the pig journeyed up and over Isabel Pass, through which the pipeline crosses the Alaska Range. The pass, relatively low and broad, wasn’t nearly as tricky to tightline as Atigun. The pig slid through without incident on April 5. It was, by then, three-quarters of the way to Valdez. That same day, a Shell pipeline in West Columbia, Texas, spilled seven hundred barrels.
Throughout the 1990s, Alyeska’s pigs and pigging techniques smartened up. NKK’s second-generation ultrasonic pig was loaded with 512 transducers that could each take 625 measurements per second. With that tool, Alyeska found and fixed nearly all of the gouges, dents, and deformations inflicted during the construction of the pipeline—what’s known as first-party damage. With that tool, in 1994, Alyeska also found corrosion in 300 joints on the pipeline. When Alyeska informed the Department of Transportation of its findings, the DOT told Alyeska to run pigs annually until it got a handle on things. In the Federal Register, the official jou
rnal of the US government, this insulting statement appeared: “the design has not prevented all corrosion from occurring.” Alyeska obliged and ran an ultrasonic pig in 1996, 1997, and 1998.
In 1996 Alyeska began storing all of its pig data in a massive single database. It gave corrosion engineers the opportunity to compare corrosion growth over time—to see if corrosion was active or passive. It also allowed company engineers to compare the reporting characteristics of its various pigs. Alyeska’s integrity manager, Elden Johnson, and a few other corrosion engineers, including a PhD named Stephen Rust, presented a paper at NACE in 1996 that compared the performances between Alyeska’s ultrasonic pig and its magnetic flux pig on runs between 1991 and 1994. Statistically speaking, the clear winner was the ultrasonic pig. But it remained far from perfect. It missed sharp edges, deformations, and wrinkles. In 1998 the pig reported calls at mile 710. Alyeska dug up the spot in the spring of 2000, found five gouges in the pipe caused during construction, and then discovered that one of them was 80 percent of the way through the pipe’s steel. The pig had caught the anomaly but underestimated its severity. The Joint Pipeline Office was not pleased. It called corrosion control a “significant concern” and “a significant maintenance challenge.”
Between 1994 and 1999, Alyeska excavated 165 spots that its pigs had alerted it to. Only a handful required repair. Compared to the blizzard of work at Atigun, this was a bunch of flurries. Based on its good record, Alyeska asked the DOT if it could pig less often: every third year rather than annually. The DOT said fine and told the company to resume pigging in 2001.
Rust: The Longest War Page 29
