You\'ll love this. Especially considering it isn\'t getting much press
NORTH SLOPE: Leak may be one of largest in 29 years of production.
By WESLEY LOY
Anchorage Daily News
Published: March 4, 2006
Last Modified: March 4, 2006 at 07:18 AM
Crews of up to 70 people are working 12-hour shifts around the clock to clean up a crude oil spill in the giant Prudhoe Bay field, state pollution regulators and a BP spokesman said Friday.
Officials still had no estimate of how much crude leaked out of a large pipeline before a BP worker discovered the leak Thursday morning.
But by early Friday afternoon, the Department of Environmental Conservation reported that vacuum trucks working the site had sucked up nearly 21,000 gallons of oil and water.
North Slope oil production remained down by 100,000 barrels a day, or 12 percent, because the leak forced the shutdown of some wells and a major oil-processing plant. The oil is worth about $6 million per day at current prices.
Oil production will be reduced indefinitely, said Daren Beaudo, spokesman for BP Exploration (Alaska) Inc., which runs the nation\'s largest oil field.
Beaudo said it wasn\'t clear how many gallons of the recovered liquid were oil and how many were melted snow. Cleanup workers will know after the liquid, being held in a storage tank, settles out and separates, he said.
Judging by the scale of the state and industry response, the spill potentially could rank among the largest crude oil spills in 29 years of Prudhoe oil production.
Cleanup workers rallied a fleet of trucks, heavy equipment and even shovels to clear away snow from 3 to 5 acres of tundra to try to assess the spread of the oil.
A small army of workers reaching from Prudhoe to Deadhorse to Fairbanks to Anchorage tackled a range of tasks: clearing snow, applying for permits to work on the delicate tundra, building an ice road and work pad around the contaminated site, peeling back insulation on the pipeline to try to find the source of the leak, testing the air for fumes that could harm workers, and taking steps to prevent as many as 245 idled Prudhoe Bay wells from freezing up.
Temperatures down to 20 degrees below zero, plus a stiff breeze, made the whole operation tougher.
Fluids were freezing in the hoses leading into the vacuum trucks, and workers were swapping out frequently to avoid frostbite, according to a DEC status report.
The pipeline was plugged to prevent any more oil from leaking, Beaudo said.
Although workers Friday had peeled back much insulation off the pipeline, which is 34 inches in diameter, they still hadn\'t found any obvious holes through which the oil could have escaped, Beaudo said.
Cleanup workers say a trail of oil had reached a lake just north of the pipeline, but tests showed the lake was frozen to the bottom, he said. The fact that the tundra and lake are frozen will aid in the cleanup.
"You never want to have an oil spill," Beaudo said. "But if it happens, these are good conditions. Snow and ice work as an ally to protect the tundra underneath, and the water."
Beaudo revealed that the big pipeline, which carried oil from two processing plants known as gathering centers to the 800-mile trans-Alaska pipeline, had known interior and exterior corrosion damage.
Because of this, BP had downgraded the maximum pressure allowed within the line to help guard against rupturing its steel walls, he said. The pipeline was operating well within the reduced pressure limit when the leak was discovered, he said.
BP can test the integrity of pipelines by sending a bullet-shaped sensor known as a smart pig through the pipe. The last time a smart pig slid through the 34-inch pipe was 1998, Beaudo said. It was scheduled for pigging this summer, he said.
The DEC, which enforces state pollution laws, had numerous staffers on the scene Friday.
BP runs Prudhoe Bay on behalf of itself, Exxon Mobil, Conoco Phillips and other oil companies.
