Potential for Work in The Big land (Fairbanks, Valdez: foreclosed, transporting)
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Time for a Re-Build my Alaskan Friends. Jobs will come, but when? , could be a while. Be early by months or miss it by being one day late.
Unless you are an exceptionally GOOD at what you do , having a foot in the door pre BOOM is mandatory.
If you have the time being in Alakshak for 3 months of the year (winter preferably) and rubbin elbows, punchin in and bein kinda local is a wise move. Theres a boom comin . Why not You? , and dont lisen to the negative Alaskan 'knowitalls', they are wanabe's and deep down hate YOU.
Everythings all screwed up-- we know that. Create Your destiny. Life is a participation endeavour.
Have a nice trip , MM
ps ; dow back to 5000 , R.E. drop 50% from Alaskan levels-- 35% in lower 48 sewer. bank holiday and your bang aint gonna get you much of a buck soon. Go HARD. 14Tril and counting--- whats it gonna take KID?
caveat--AK has the ability of selfsustaining, huge for me.
the pix didnt link click below and see a dirty pig. not pretty;
Less oil may spell problems for pipeline
SLOW FLOW: Execs fear ice and wax will boost corrosion, spills.
Alyeska Pipeline Service Co.
In October, workers at a pump station 146 miles south of Prudhoe Bay clean off a scraper pig, a device inserted in the trans-Alaska pipeline to remove wax that collects on the pipe's interior walls.
The declining flow of oil from Alaska's North Slope is creating anxiety among executives who run the trans-Alaska pipeline.
Within a matter of years, they say, they will need to take costly steps to preserve the life of the 800-mile-long line.
If they aren't successful, ice and wax could become a serious problem for the pipeline, increasing the risk of corrosion and spills.
Alyeska Pipeline Service Co.'s sense of urgency isn't because the North Slope is running out of oil.
The Slope's producing oil fields still contain enough oil to supply the pipeline for at least several more decades. Many other oil prospects on land and in the ocean remain unexplored.
So what's the problem?
In the 1980s, at peak oil flows, a barrel of oil made the trip from Prudhoe Bay to Valdez in four days.
Now it takes 13 days.
The slower flow causes the temperature of the hot oil to cool faster. At some point, the oil temperature will dip below the freezing point of water along certain segments, unless Alyeska reheats the oil inside the pipe.
As it gets colder, ice and wax may coat the insides of the pipeline. The colder oil might also increase the risk of buried segments of the pipeline jacking up in the ground, company officials said.
The problems have been building for decades and will only become more pressing as oil production declines further.
For example, Alyeska, owned by BP, Conoco Phillips, Exxon Mobil and two smaller companies, used to launch devices to scrape wax -- a component of the oil -- out of the pipe's interior every several weeks.
Now it's every four to seven days.
While ice formation is not yet a problem in the trans-Alaska pipeline, it was the alleged cause of Prudhoe Bay's second-largest oil spill from a smaller pipeline a month ago.
Alyeska officials said they don't know yet how soon they will need to make major upgrades to the trans-Alaska pipeline to deal with the colder oil temperature and how much it will cost. They hope to have some answers by the end of next year, when they conclude a $10 million study of the problem.
One thing they do know: New oil production from undeveloped oil prospects in the Arctic will not come on line soon enough to sidestep the problem.
WHAT'S AT STAKE?
A damaged trans-Alaska pipeline would be big trouble for the state. The millions of barrels of oil that flow through it every week supply most of the tax revenue in the state's general fund and 10 percent of the country's oil production.
It would be devastating for Alaska's private sector, which depends on the sustained flow of oil for thousands of jobs.
The health of the pipeline is also critical to BP, Conoco and Exxon, which pour their North Slope oil output into it. They've funded millions for corrosion-related repairs and other upgrades to the pipeline since it was built in the 1970s. They recently funded the $10 million project to study the reduced oil flow problem.
Alyeska has talked to the Joint Pipeline Office, a government agency, since the early 1990s about how declining oil flow could affect the pipeline, said Jerry Brossia, the agency's top federal regulator.
"It's always been on the radar screen," Brossia said. The Joint Pipeline Office is composed of a dozen state and federal agencies that regulate the trans-Alaska pipeline.
Among Alyeska's earlier projects to adapt to declining oil flow was its $500 million project, finished this year, to replace the pumps that move the oil to Valdez. That project was plagued with cost overruns and other mishaps. The new pumps are now configured to work when the pipeline is transporting as little as 300,000 barrels per day. This year, the pipeline moved roughly 700,000 barrels per day, one-third of its peak flow in the late 1980s.
THE CANADIAN LAB
Alyeska officials said they can prevent reduced oil flow from harming the pipeline but they conceded their research is taking them into uncharted territory.
"There's very little information elsewhere in the world on running pipelines in the Arctic at low temperatures," said Mike Joynor, an Alyeska vice president involved in the $10 million study.
The company's inquiries led to a series of experiments that began last summer at an Imperial Oil-owned laboratory in Sarnia, Ontario, just north of Detroit. Imperial is a Canadian company partly owned by Exxon Mobil. Exxon has a 20.3 percent stake in the Trans Alaska Pipeline System, or TAPS.
The tests in Ontario involve running a couple different blends of North Slope crude oil through a series of pipe loops. In one loop, researchers working for Alyeska test the impact of cooling temperatures on wax suspended in the oil. In another, they test ice formation.
The pipeline company is also running tests on crude oil at its offices in Valdez and at the pipeline pump station near Delta, said Alyeska spokeswoman Michelle Egan.
Cooler oil is already causing headaches for the company.
Oil enters the pipeline at Prudhoe Bay at 110 degrees, but because it flows slower than in the past, the temperature drops quicker and remains below 70 degrees for much of its trip. When the oil temperature falls below 70, its wax content falls out. The wax will coat the pipe walls and hide corrosion if it isn't scraped out soon. Also, the wax can clog sensors on the large devices called smart pigs that shoot through the pipeline hunting for corrosion.
Alyeska got a wake-up call on wax in 2006, during the partial shutdown of the Prudhoe Bay field after a major oil spill. The sensors on a smart pig launched into the pipeline became clogged with wax and it failed to collect data. Since then, Alyeska has been sending scraper pigs, another bullet-shaped device, down the pipe on a weekly basis.
Alyeska officials believe they may see problems more worrisome than wax as soon as five years from now.
They say that when the flow rate drops to only 500,000 barrels of oil a day, the oil temperature at certain points along the route north of Fairbanks could dip below 32 degrees. The small amount of water suspended in the oil could settle out and form ice crystals. Ice that coats pipe walls could create a hospitable spot for corrosion. Ice chunks that could form might batter pump-station equipment, regulators worry. Also, during a long pipeline shutdown, ice could plug sections of the line, making it difficult to restart the oil flow.
Another problem might appear 15 to 20 years from now when the pipeline is projected to be moving just 300,000 or 350,000 barrels per day. At that point, the oil would no longer heat the ground around the buried sections of the pipeline enough to prevent the pipe from jacking up during frost heaves. While that is not expected to be a problem along the entire 400 miles of buried pipe, it would create too much strain on the pipe in certain areas, according to the company.
FINDING A FIX
Alyeska officials said they are optimistic that all of the bad consequences of lower oil flows can be avoided.
The company is considering fixes such as heating up the oil, adding chemicals to prevent water from freezing or wax from clogging the pipeline, and removing the water suspended in the oil before the oil enters the pipeline, Joynor said.
The fixes will likely be costly, but they are "at the heart of preserving the viability of TAPS," he said.
If the company wants to proceed with any of those changes, it would need to get approval from state and federal regulators at the Joint Pipeline Office.
Alyeska's scrutiny of the problem comes at a time when oil prices remain high, but despite the high prices BP and Conoco -- two of the majority owners of the pipeline -- are cutting jobs and spending. They say they are suffering from higher state taxes, higher maintenance costs and greater resistance to Arctic oil and gas exploration.
Alyeska, the pipeline's operator, isn't immune from the cutbacks. Next year, the company says, it will trim its work force by 60 employees, replace some of its contractors with cheaper, non-union workers and slash its spending in Alaska by 14 percent.
Some pipeline watchdog groups are worried that the loss of experienced workers could increase the potential for spills or other accidents. Those things have happened during previous industry cutbacks, said Stan Jones, spokesman for the Prince William Sound Citizens' Advisory Council, a watchdog group that monitors the oil-laden tankers that leave Alyeska's port in Valdez.
The pipeline company said that despite the cutbacks it is doing more to preserve the line, hiring more staff who work on pipeline integrity issues and funding new projects to address corrosion.
END OF THE LINE?
Due to the uncertainty about oil prices and the North Slope's production decline, it's hard to predict when the oil companies will decide it no longer makes sense to run the pipeline.
The increased cost of piping the oil to the Valdez tanker port is just one part of their decision-making. Ultimately, the companies will determine whether the oil fields are generating the financial returns they want, state and federal officials said.
Oil prices broke out of their historic range six years ago and have remained relatively high since then. State officials say that if the price stays high, the producers will find it more appealing to keep exploring for oil on the North Slope and spending money to upgrade trans-Alaska pipeline operations.
Some state politicians pushing to cut the oil industry's state taxes recently warned the trans-Alaska pipeline could shut down as early as 2018. But state officials think that's extremely unlikely. They point to recent oil industry filings with the federal Securities and Exchange Commission that say the pipeline could remain viable as late as 2050.
U.S. Department of Energy officials say that there could be enough oil on the Slope and in offshore prospects to require a oil pipeline -- a refurbished line or a brand-new one -- to operate in Alaska beyond 2050.
The main concept everyone should take away from this is that for the longest time, the idea of the pipeline ever shutting down has been inconcievable to most Alaskans. Now, it is being discussed as a real possibility, and not something in the distant future either. People need to wake up and realize that the Alaska's Golden Goose is on critical life support, clinging to viability. Sure, many of the causes are due to forces out of our control, but many are also consequences of poor choices and policy decisions made by our state. We need to decide what we want our state's economic future to look like now, and not wait around for others outside of Alaska to decide for us. I guarantee they don't have our best interests in mind.
Crude is nearly $80 per barrel, and we're in the dead of winter. Gasoline is running at ~$3.00 per gallon in my area. This is really putting the screws to people's budgets, and if it goes higher this spring, which is the chatter amongst all those special interests (Goldman Sachs comes to mind), then the economy will slip further into the abyss. Not enough attention was given or paid to the impact $150 per barrel oil had upon the economy. It was absolutely devastating.
This country runs on cheap oil and people eating salads shipped from 2500 miles away. It's not sustainable. Something has GOT to give, and will. Whether relief comes in the name of higher paying jobs (not likely), lower oil prices due to more supply and less demand (which should be happening right now but it's not due to greedy Wall St. banks (see Goldman)), alternative energies gaining market share, a complete change in lifestyles, or a combination of all of these, it will come. In the meantime, these next several years are not going to be pretty, economically speaking. Time to hunker down.
The main concept everyone should take away from this is that for the longest time, the idea of the pipeline ever shutting down has been inconcievable to most Alaskans. Now, it is being discussed as a real possibility, and not something in the distant future either. People need to wake up and realize that the Alaska's Golden Goose is on critical life support, clinging to viability. Sure, many of the causes are due to forces out of our control, but many are also consequences of poor choices and policy decisions made by our state. We need to decide what we want our state's economic future to look like now, and not wait around for others outside of Alaska to decide for us. I guarantee they don't have our best interests in mind.
Moose, do you think that ACES has played a significant part in this?
As far the the OP goes, the only boom coming any time soon will be if Redoubt blows again. I guess it's easy to encourage people to move up when you're living in Nevada or wherever but anyone reading this post would serve themselves well by taking the advice of everyone who is at all familiar with the place to have either a job secured before making the move or lots of money in the bank.
Moose, do you think that ACES has played a significant part in this?
All I can say for sure is what I have seen with my own eyes. Towards the end of '07 exploration up on the slope was going at full tilt, the most notable to me was Chevron's White Hills Project (about 50 miles south west of Prudhoe in the NPR). The amount of equipment and manpower being staged for that project was truly staggering - I drove by the staging area at Franklin Bluffs on the Dalton many times, it looked like a small city was being shipped out there. Towards the beginning of '08 however the project was shut down completely.
Granted, the price of oil also collapsed about that time but it seemed to me that the activity started ramping down well before the price moved. Most of the other large scale exploration projects up there followed the same pattern. Also, prices have recovered somewhat and there is no sign of ANY activity in the area to this day, yet exploration and development in other parts in the world is now back in an upswing. And of course the most recent attention grabbing headline was - for the first time in over 40 years Conoco Phillips won't be sinking a single new exploration well up on the slope this season.
I'm sure there will be the usual conspiracy theories of how this is just another plot by "big business" to screw Alaska. All I can say is that raising taxes on something never gets you more of that thing. Rasing taxes on anything only gets you more government.
There isn't a shortage of oil on the North Slope, there is a lack of political will to get to it.
Currently this summer there will be a lot of money spent in offshore work in location of deposits. Whether they can get the oil to shore will be an entirely different matter which is where I work on the water.
If the oil came to a stop for any reason, Alaska would shrivel up and blow away. The entire North Slope is run off the oil money and if that stopped, the people that live there would fall on very hard times to say the least.
The pipeline was built to last some thirty years, it is now about 33 years old. The maintenance has been deferred to a point where the internal sections of the pipe are corroded and will start failing more and more often as time goes by. The other half of my company cleans up those spills.... so we are going to get a lot busier too..
There are many reasons the flow in the pipeline is down almost half of what it use to be, one is the condition of the line itself, it may not be able to take the normally high pressures that it use to endure flawlessly, now the operation pressures are well below the original pressures it was designed to run at... and it may simply not be able stand those pressures anymore...
In about early 1985 there was a lull in oil work on the Slope and a large number of people were laid off, by 1988, you could buy a house for almost 30% of it's former value.... whole neighborhoods were abandoned or being foreclosed on, and the pipeline was still running... The EXXON Valdez Oil Spill dumped almost three billion dollars into the Alaska Economy in 1989, and it sprung back into life and has been on the upswing since.... just waiting for the next lull, and it won't be a pretty one....
So if it dries up... it will be a cold summer, not to mention what winter will be like.
There will still be other service industries for tourism and fishing but they will get pretty tight!
Last edited by starlite9; 12-29-2009 at 01:33 AM..
The main concept everyone should take away from this is that for the longest time, the idea of the pipeline ever shutting down has been inconcievable to most Alaskans. Now, it is being discussed as a real possibility, and not something in the distant future either. People need to wake up and realize that the Alaska's Golden Goose is on critical life support, clinging to viability. Sure, many of the causes are due to forces out of our control, but many are also consequences of poor choices and policy decisions made by our state. We need to decide what we want our state's economic future to look like now, and not wait around for others outside of Alaska to decide for us. I guarantee they don't have our best interests in mind.
ANWAR?
ALASKA is richer in NR than the whole Lower 48 sewer combined.
Bridges, highways and roads are on a maintaince schedule. All are resurfaced , rebuilt every 7 to 15 years. Not so with the Alaskan pipeline.
USA credit-card is about to reach over-maxed point. Is it time to wake up and speak out? well I GUESS!
There isnt anymore credit My Alaskan Friends . The credit crisis isnt over and the recovery isnt underway. . 300 more companies will default on there debt in 2011. Pain? and on top of that 150$ crude is coming back to the villages. Ignore that!
smoke em ifya gotem...
The deficit for 2010 is gonna be close to $2 trillion, up from $1.4 trillion in 2009. Ive worked fo the biggest Corp's amd these dudes arent gonna take the fall in revenue easy. Axe away on OUR piddly expendable behinds.
Why the pipeline has been ignored? Cause its being fazed out.
Seeya at Dow 4000 and SP at 600-- see what your 401K is worth then .
"Seeya at Dow 4000 and SP at 600-- see what your 401K is worth then."
Geez, and I thought I was bearish on stocks. If the DOW hits 4000, it ain't gonna be pretty.
Edit- I might add that I question how, with bubbles Bernanke at the helm, the DOW could ever drop so low. This guy will print money like Zimbabwe before he'd ever allow that. I'm not a fan of his policies, mind you.
"Seeya at Dow 4000 and SP at 600-- see what your 401K is worth then."
Geez, and I thought I was bearish on stocks. If the DOW hits 4000, it ain't gonna be pretty.
Edit- I might add that I question how, with bubbles Bernanke at the helm, the DOW could ever drop so low. This guy will print money like Zimbabwe before he'd ever allow that. I'm not a fan of his policies, mind you.
Sadly the presses are already at full tilt....
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