Another Alaskan love story.

To complement the recent "wedding" blog, here are two other love stories, concerning:

America's love for oil.

And Alaska's love for the income and jobs it produces.

Here are the facts, copied from articles in Alaskan newspapers:

1) The pipeline now accounts for 11 percent of U.S. domestic oil supply.
2) The pipeline is aging, along with the Prudhoe Bay oil fields. That means the amount of oil flowing through the pipeline is declining as oil reserves on the North Slope are drawn down. Oil through-put peaked at 2.1 million barrels a day in 1988. It averaged about 590,000 barrels a day last year.

So, Alaska has been deciding on lowering the taxes they charge companies for removing the natural resource.
And it is a heated argument. Is it really going to increase drilling and exploration by lowering the taxes?

It is an important question. It is from those taxes that we get the our yearly "dividend" fund form the state. Imagine: they pay us to live there, instead of us paying state taxes!

There is another problem. Not only is the Prudhoe field producing less, it is a much thicker oil than it originally produced. The combination of those two facts means that in about 2020 they will have to heat up either the the pipeline or the oil to keep it flowing! And the whole field will run dry between 2040 and 2060, depending on whom you listen to.

There is  a lot of natural gas up there too. But there are problems with that too. The newest estimates I've read for build a gas line (right next to the oil pipeline) varies between 35 and 65 billion dollars. With the abundance of natural gas so great and the price so cheap in the lower 48, it just doesn't seem reasonable to build. Some are still encouraging it, hoping on Japan and China buying that gas.

But, they had planned for it originally. See the peculiar "sidewalk" on the right of that bridge?

It's a support system they originally put in, ready for a natural gas line parallel to the oil one.

Anyway...
The pipeline is now 35 years old. But it is an engineering marvel. Once the Arabs raised the price of oil back in the late 60's/early 70s, it took only took between 2-3 years to build the pipeline form beginning to pumping. It's 800 mile long, going form areas where it the permafrost is only 6 inches to hundreds thick. Those cooling towers I showed you on a prior blog have done a great job.

Here's pic showing it's size:

Ever wondered how they keep the inside form getting all sludged-up?

You can double click on any of the pictures above if you want to read the written info in them.





Well, its a "torpedo" they send down it's lumen to scrape things ou and take Ultrasound pictures of the pipe along the way!


Imagine, they designed an built this way back when even I was a kid in college. Pretty ingenious of those guys, I think.



And to prevent problems form earthquakes, (there are dozens of them per day in Alaska), it was built on rails on top of the posts that go into the ground. A few years ago we had a quake which was 7.8 in strength that went right through it (you didn't hear about it because it is an unpopulated area near Denali). And it had no trouble. The pipeline was designed to withstand an 8.2 quake (since then they downgraded it's ability to withstand a quake down to 8.0, I think). Anyway it has done its job marvelously.

Once we thought that the Prudhoe field and other Alaska oil was going to help prevent oil shortages for the USA. Now we in South Texas hear that our local fields are going to last for 150 years.

But similar to love and marriage, it doesn't always last as long as expected at the time of the Honeymoon.