It was just one of those coincidental ironies of history that the formal application for the Trans-Alaska Pipeline System was filed with the Department of the Interior on June 6, 1969, the twenty-fifth anniversary of the D-day invasion of Normandy. Over the next few years, however, D-day would prove to be an apt analogy to describe the opening round of what became another heated and lengthy Alaskan battle. Initially, any pipeline across federal lands was required to comply with the right-of-way provisions of the Mineral Leasing Act of 1920. By the time the Native land claims were settled and the land freeze lifted, however, there was also a whole new list of requirements to be met under the recently enacted National Environmental Policy Act of 1969. NEPA, as the act came to be called, was then largely uncharted water. Many of its early precedents and procedures were debated and litigated while oil companies anxiously sought a way to deliver Prudhoe Bay crude.
The Trans-Alaska Pipeline System (TAPS) began late in 1968 as an unincorporated joint venture of the three major companies controlling production from the initial Prudhoe Bay discoveries: British Petroleum (BP), Atlantic Richfield (ARCO), and Humble, soon to be swallowed by Exxon. BP and ARCO each held a 37.5 percent stake, while Humble was in for 25 percent. In February 1969, TAPS announced plans to build a forty-eight-inch pipeline—larger in diameter than had ever been laid—from Prudhoe Bay south roughly 800 miles to the ice-free port of Valdez. The pipeline, eleven pumping stations, and storage and loading facilities at Valdez were estimated to cost $900 million and be capable of initially delivering 500,000 barrels of oil a day. The completion date? Sometime in 1972 seemed reasonable. Forty-eight-inch pipe was ordered from steel mills in Japan, because no American mills could guarantee that size pipe in both the quantity and time frame required.
In September 1969, the big lease sale was held. It was just another coincidence that Alaska’s $900-million revenue windfall from the sale equaled initial construction estimates for the delivery system. By now, there were five other companies in the TAPS joint venture. BP and ARCO each gave up 10 percent of the total, which was allocated as follows: 8.5 percent to Mobil, 3.25 percent each to Phillips and Union of California, 3 percent for Amerada-Hess, and 2 percent for Home Oil, although Home later withdrew from the venture.35
With the pipe on order and the winter construction season approaching, the consortium was eager to begin work. All that was needed was the right-of-way permit from the Department of the Interior, and Secretary Hickel was under considerable pressure to expedite it. Such action, it will be remembered, was a modification of the land freeze order, and because of the condition imposed on Hickel’s Senate confirmation, it required the consent of the interior committees of both the House and the Senate.
Early on, both committees were generally inclined to modify the land freeze to accommodate pipeline construction, and in fact, the Senate interior committee approved modifying the freeze to permit construction of the first phase of the haul road north from Livengood. But before the committees could act on the pipeline right-of-way, an increasing number of environmental issues were raised—some by such groups as the Sierra Club and the Wilderness Society, but others by Hickel’s own Department of the Interior.
Undersecretary Russell E. Train had been charged with coordinating a task force to study the impacts of the pipeline on the Arctic environment prior to the issuance of a permit. When the preliminary report was delivered on September 15, 1969, its members professed to have been “guided by the view that oil development and environmental protection are not inconsistent.” But to many, the findings seemed to be more of a status report on the application process rather than constructive suggestions on how this could be accomplished. The task force listed a number of problems for which no ready solutions had been found despite a flurry of exchanges with the oil companies.
The biggest technical issue was the effect that hot oil transported in traditionally buried pipe would have on Alaska’s permafrost. Prudhoe Bay crude came out of the wellhead at 160 degrees Fahrenheit—hotter than most domestic hot-water heaters. Cooling the oil before sending it down the pipe wasn’t much of an option because tests showed that cooling and then reheating Prudhoe Bay crude turned it into tar. Reheating would occur simply by virtue of the friction generated at the eleven pumping stations along the line. Thus, the line was going to be hot no matter what. The hot pipe’s impact on the permafrost, some said, was going to be like pushing a hot nail or knife into a block of ice. Heat the pipe, melt the ice, and spill the oil. The Department of the Interior group concluded that the oil industry’s plan to bury the pipe just wouldn’t work.
Water pollution from construction activities and possible spills, tanker discharges of oily ballast, impacts on wildlife, and potential earthquake zones were also identified as unsolved problems. Then too, of course, there was the pending legal issue of Native land claims and the additional legal issue that TAPS had requested a right-of-way almost twice the width of that authorized under the Mineral Leasing Act of 1920. All in all, it was quite a laundry list of concerns. Meanwhile, the TAPS project manager boasted to the Senate interior committee that the first shipment of Japanese-manufactured pipe was scheduled to be unloaded in Valdez any day.36
Secretary Hickel assured Congress that his department had no intention of issuing a right-of-way permit until these issues were addressed, but he also argued that lifting the land freeze in the meantime was merely a procedural step in clearing the way for such future action. Based on this assurance, and Hickel’s dubious assertion that lifting the freeze would not unduly impact the Native claims settlement process, both House and Senate interior committees approved modifying the freeze to accommodate the issuance of the pipeline permit. Senate chairman Henry Jackson made it clear, however, that his committee remained very concerned about the environmental impacts of the project. Jackson noted that the new National Environmental Policy Act of 1969—then just out of conference committee and about to be voted upon—required a public statement analyzing the environmental impacts of any federally funded project or any project on federal lands, including an evaluation of alternatives.
Hickel figured that the easiest first step was to issue a right-of-way permit for construction of the haul road that was required to transport the enormous tonnage of equipment and material along the pipeline corridor. But without waiting for such action, the state of Alaska set about reopening the Hickel Highway—essentially grading its second swath—in order to rush equipment north before the spring thaw. This equipment had to be in place, the argument ran, so that when the official permit was issued, construction companies would already be mobilized along the route to construct the permanent haul road—in most instances the third road cut across the tundra.
With Alaska governor Keith Miller champing at the bit to get the road completed, Hickel was playing a game of catch-up in issuing the road permit. Then the legal process brought things to a standstill with a bang. Five Native villages filed suit in federal district court to enjoin Secretary Hickel from issuing the permit on the grounds that they and not the federal government owned some of the lands over which it would pass. On the one hand, Hickel was blindsided because the suit ran counter to certain construction waivers that some villages had signed the previous fall. Evidently, however, these were obtained in part by promises of Native employment on the project. With construction crews jumping the gun and no Native contractors involved, the Natives went to court. It was a busy place.
At the same time, the Wilderness Society, Friends of the Earth, and the Environmental Defense Fund filed suit in the same federal district court to halt the entire TAPS project. They claimed that it violated the right-of-way limits of the Mineral Leasing Act of 1920 and hadn’t provided the environmental impact statement required by the newly enacted National Environmental Policy Act. Governor Miller threw up his hands and, apparently having learned nothing to date from the Hickel Highway fiasco, declared with questionable jurisdiction that he would authorize the haul road himself as a state highway. While Alaskans cheered such independence, Secretary Hickel was forced to express public shock and disdain at such overreaching, although he may have winked in Miller’s direction as he said it. TAPS for its part wisely decided to wait for a federal permit. No one could have predicted then that the wait would be for years and years.37
The Alaska Pipeline permitting process became NEPA’s baptism under fire. With no rules or regulations yet in place to implement the law, the Department of the Interior first made an effort to comply with its intent by issuing an environmental impact statement for the haul road. The document was eight pages long. In April 1970, federal judge George L. Hart, Jr., ruled that not only were the various rights-of-way for the pipeline, its extra width, and the haul road one project and as such in violation of the size restrictions of the Mineral Leasing Act, but also that whatever NEPA’s intent, an eight-page environmental analysis just didn’t cut it. But most significant, Judge Hart also ruled that environmental groups such as the Wilderness Society, Friends of the Earth, and the Environmental Defense Fund did indeed have the legal right—“standing,” in the lexicon—to sue in such matters and claim irreparable injury in the face of such federal action.
By the following year, the Department of the Interior’s Draft Environmental Impact Statement had grown to 12,000 pages. By then, despite the D-day coincidence of the permit’s filing date, the military meaning of the acronym TAPS was echoing with an uncomfortable finality. The oil companies reorganized TAPS as the Alyeska Pipeline Service Corporation and appointed Humble Oil executive Edward L. Patton as its head. Patton had extensive experience building refineries in both Norway and northern California in the face of a web of governmental regulations and procedures. He would stay in charge until oil finally flowed to Valdez, but when he first took the job, the timetable and even the eventuality of the pipeline itself were still very much in doubt.38
Needless to say, the oil companies and many Alaskans were not taking these delays in the best of humor. Ever the promoter, Anchorage publisher Bob Atwood scoffed at the idea that Alyeska would risk losing oil through major spills. “The companies have a common interest with proper conservationists,” Atwood told an outside journalist, “but these other kooks—they talk wildly and people seem to listen to them.”39
Causing particular ire were the conservationists from “outside” who seemed bent on telling Alaskans what was in their best interests. Conceding that there wasn’t much anyone could say or do to convince these “environmental crusaders” that the pipeline was going to be anything less than an unmitigated disaster, the Ketchikan Daily News editorialized: “These people are not interested in a pipeline under any conditions and they add their voices to professional conservationists who make a practice of opposing any development any place—Sierra Club, Friends of the Earth, etc.”40 No wonder John McPhee wrote of a fellow’s bruin encounter and concluded only partially tongue in cheek that “when you are the Sierra Club’s man in Alaska, the least of your problems is bears.”41
By December 1971, the Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act was law, and at least one piece of uncertainty had been removed from the process. Meanwhile, the first feeble attempt at an environmental impact statement (EIS) suggested that the haul road alternatives were between building the road immediately or building it in three years, and between a federal- or a state-controlled right-of-way. But then a U.S. court of appeals ruled that when it came to considering action alternatives, NEPA required a very broad discussion. Not only did this mean that the long-held route of the pipeline generally along the Hickel Highway corridor—in part because 2,542-foot Anaktuvuk Pass was the lowest crossing of the Brooks Range—must be scrutinized, but also that alternative routes as well as transportation methods must be studied.
Among the alternatives, loading crude directly onto tankers at Prudhoe Bay was pretty much out of the question. The Manhattan voyages had proven the folly of that. Pipeline guys tended to draw straight lines on maps. Yet despite this mentality of a straight-shot pipeline south to the Gulf of Alaska—via Anaktuvuk Pass or some other route—there had also been early talk about a route through Canada. This route would take the pipeline eastward from Prudhoe Bay, along the coastal plain of the Arctic National Wildlife Range, and generally southeast up the Mackenzie River valley to the vicinity of Edmonton and the existing pipelines and refineries of both the Pacific Northwest and the greater Midwest. While this route would be at least twice as long, pass through a friendly though foreign country, and also raise considerable environmental concerns, it had numerous advantages.
First and foremost, a trans-Canadian route would eliminate all tanker traffic. The oil would be delivered by pipe directly to refineries. Thus, while the permafrost issues were likely to grow because of the longer route, there would be no oil danger to North Pacific fisheries, particularly in Prince William Sound. A trans-Canadian route would also avoid the earthquake zones that Valdez knew only too well. Finally, but perhaps most economically significant in the long run, a system of land pipelines would also be capable of transporting Prudhoe Bay’s estimated 26 trillion cubic feet of natural gas to markets.42
But not too many people were thinking about the long run in 1972. The oil companies were tired of sitting on reserves that couldn’t be delivered to market. The state of Alaska was watching its $900 million windfall from the 1969 lease sale disappear in the face of growing demands and badly wanted its share of production royalties. The federal government had already paid what some people thought was a ransom to settle the Native land claims and remove that roadblock to the pipeline’s construction. It was time for the oil to flow.
The draft EIS initially devoted only two of its 12,000 pages to the alternative of a Canadian pipeline route. Even when forced by court action to expand on this, the Department of the Interior could never overcome the groundswell of support from the oil companies and most Alaskans for an all-Alaska route. These Alaskans demanded that the pipeline avoid Canadian soil with a vigor that was reminiscent of the debates over the routes to the Klondike three-quarters of a century earlier.
Moderates like Alaska’s soon-to-be governor Jay Hammond, who tried to walk a middle ground between those who would lock up the land and those who would develop it and ask questions about impacts later, ended up the target of ridicule from both sides. In truth, Hammond supported development that caused little environmental impact and that paid its own way, and he wasn’t convinced that the pipeline met either criteria. Hammond tried to promote greater study of the trans-Canada route, but he was shouted down. (How Jay Hammond managed to say all of this, antagonize so many people, and still be elected governor of Alaska in 1974 is a whole other story—as well as a commentary on Alaska politics!) “Winning their specious argument,” reflected Jay Hammond years later of the all-Alaska route promoters, “may have been one of the most costly mistakes of the 20th Century.”43
In retrospect, Hammond and the few others who questioned the trans-Alaska route were proved correct. When West Coast refineries were stretched to capacity by the pipeline’s 2-million-barrel-a-day discharge, Alaskan crude ended up being transferred to smaller tankers on the West Coast for transit through the narrow Panama Canal and shipped north to Texas and East Coast refineries. It was definitely the long way around. Many years later—after the 1989 Exxon Valdez catastrophe in Prince William Sound and amid cries for development of production from what became the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge—there is still no way of transporting Prudhoe Bay’s trove of natural gas southward.
But again, that was the long run. The short run was summarized by Secretary of the Interior Rogers C. B. Morton on May 11, 1972, when he announced his intent to issue the pipeline permit. “I am convinced,” said the secretary, “that it is in our best national interest to avoid all further delays and uncertainties in planning the development of the Alaska North Slope reserves by having a secure pipeline located under the total jurisdiction and for the exclusive use of the United States.”44 That statement aside, there was another round of litigation, a portion of which found that the project’s environmental requirements under NEPA had in fact been met. Then in February 1973, a federal court of appeals ruled that if Alyeska did in fact require a right-of-way for the pipeline wider than that authorized by the Mineral Leasing Act of 1920, its redress must be sought from Congress and not the courts.
Spurred on by the Arab oil embargo and resulting fuel shortages, Congress at last decided to take legislative action. The crucial moment came on July 17, 1973, when the U.S. Senate voted on an amendment offered by Alaska’s Mike Gravel to declare that the ponderous requirements of NEPA had been met and simply to authorize the construction of the pipeline. The outcome of the vote was a 49-to-49 tie. For the first time in four years, Vice President Spiro Agnew, then only weeks away from resigning his office, cast the deciding vote in favor of the pipeline. Similar legislation passed the House, and finally on November 16, 1973, Richard Nixon signed the Alaska Pipeline Authorization into law.45 Almost six years had passed since that heady test of the Prudhoe Bay State No. 1 well.
And so the rush was on again. In 1974, the floodgates opened, and construction workers flowed north on a tidal wave the likes of which had not been seen in Alaska since the gold rush or World War II. Heavy equipment operators, pipe fitters, welders, truck drivers, surveyors, laborers, cooks, bakers, housekeepers, and assorted camp followers all headed north to work on the line. Anchorage and Fairbanks boomed, and Valdez? Well, Valdez was about to undergo a transformation almost as jarring as the 1964 earthquake.
Two big things had changed on the pipeline since the early days of 1969. The first was its route. While Anaktuvuk Pass was indeed the lowest crossing of the Brooks Range, that route required the line to detour westward. Its biggest drawback, however, was a lack of sizable gravel deposits. Good gravel is important to most construction operations, but it is essential to Arctic construction as an insulator and stabilizer on top of permafrost. The tundra quagmires along the abandoned Hickel Highway both north and south of Anaktuvuk Pass still bore mute testimony to that fact.
So a route was surveyed from Prudhoe Bay south up the gravel-laden Sagananvirktok and Atigun River valleys to 4,790-foot Atigun Pass, and then down the Dietrich River and the Middle Fork of the Koyukuk past the old placer mining camps of Wiseman, Coldfoot, and Tramway Bar. Not only did the river valleys on either side of Atigun Pass offer ready gravel sources, but at the time this route seemed to mollify moderate environmentalists, who continued to dream about the Gates of the Arctic National Monument centered in the heart of the Brooks Range around Anaktuvuk Pass.
Farther south the pipeline corridor met the original trace of the Hickel Highway, crossed the Yukon, and continued to Livengood and Fairbanks. South of Fairbanks, the route crossed the Alaska Range at Isabel Pass and the Chugach Mountains at Thompson Pass before dropping almost 3,000 feet into Valdez, through Keystone Canyon. From Prudhoe Bay to Valdez, the route came to 789 miles.
The other big change centered on the VSM—pipeline shorthand for “vertical support member.” VSMs—some 78,000 of them—would become the skeleton across which the four-foot-wide pipe would be stretched like a string of spaghetti. This was the solution to the permafrost problem. About half of the line was to be buried conventionally, but the other half was to be elevated above ground on VSMs. A VSM was an upright piece of eighteen-inch steel pipe installed in pairs and spaced every fifty to seventy feet. Each pair of VSMs was connected by a steel crossbeam. The pipe rode in a saddlelike assembly mounted atop the crossbeam but capable of sliding back and forth as the pipeline expanded and contracted with changing temperatures. The whole system was installed in a trapezoid pattern that zigzagged back and forth between straight legs. This construction also provided flexibility in the event of an earthquake.
VSMs got the hot pipe away from the permafrost, but the VSMs themselves were still in contact with it. Marginal permafrost with temperatures only slightly less than freezing reacts against the intrusion of anything slightly warmer. The VSMs might be heaved out of the ground or swallowed into the permafrost—in either event twisting the pipeline out of alignment. While a variety of footers were tested to alleviate this problem, the final answer was to use thermal VSMs except in places where they rested on bedrock or were sunk in thaw-stable permafrost in the very far north. Thermal VSMs essentially had their own nonmechanical, natural convection system that worked like a radiator to release heat buildup from the VSMs into the atmosphere, thus keeping their underground contact with the permafrost cool.46
Twelve pump stations were strategically placed along the 789-mile route to boost the crude over the three main mountain ranges. Four stations were located on the North Slope for the climb over Atigun Pass, another four along the ups and downs through the Yukon Basin to Fairbanks, two for the climb to Isabel Pass, and the final two for the grade north of Thompson Pass.
Work officially began on the new haul road on April 29, 1974, after the state of Alaska approved the final permits for those portions of the road crossing state lands. By the end of September, all of the gravel—some 35 million cubic yards—was down, and grading was completed by mid-November. The 361-mile road from Livengood to Prudhoe Bay along with twenty major bridges was built in 154 days at the cost of around $500,000 per mile. In a moment reminiscent of the linkup of the Alaska Highway at Contact Creek, a ribbon-cutting ceremony was held on a rise above the South Fork of the Koyukuk between Coldfoot and Prospect Creek.
The only missing link was the crossing of the Yukon River. An ice bridge was used during the winter of 1974–75 as personnel and materials continued to roll north. By the following fall, the state of Alaska had completed a permanent crossing, a half-mile-long highway bridge with five massive piers that was partially paid for by Alyeska. In return, the pipeline would be strapped to the bridge and save Alyeska much treacherous excavation work in the river’s ever-changing bottom.47
Construction of the actual pipeline began in March 1975, using the same forty-eight-inch pipe that had been stockpiled in Seward, Valdez, and other points since its 1969 delivery from Japan. The first section to be laid was the crossing of the Tonsina River about seventy miles north of Valdez. A 1,400-foot-long string of 40-foot sections was welded together, weighted with temporary concrete collars, and then gingerly lowered into a ditch dug across the riverbed. The ditch was backfilled with gravel, and the concrete weights were removed.
The pipe was supposed to be snug in its trench, but with the weights removed, the whole section popped out of its trench like some Halloween ghoul out of a coffin. It was an inauspicious beginning, and it took another three and a half weeks to get the pipe firmly in place. That done, it would be a year and a half before it was discovered in the final testing that this first section of pipe had been crushed during this initial work. By then, the expedient remedy was to abandon that section and lay new pipe just upstream. Thus, the Tonsina crossing—one of some 800-odd stream crossings along the route—had the distinction of being both the first and the last section of the Alaska Pipeline to be completed.48
Before the pipeline was completed, upwards of 70,000 men and women could say that they had had some hand in its construction. At the peak, 20,000 workers were directly employed by Alyeska and its subcontractors at one time. The biggest concentration was at the terminal in Valdez, where the construction of dock facilities, storage tanks, a ballast treatment system, control center, and the pipeline itself down from Thompson Pass kept as many as 4,000 workers busy. Thirty-four two-story barracks, denoted A through HH, were scrunched together like so many mobile homes on one end of the terminal complex. Each building had fifty-two double rooms. It helped to like your roommate.
But the pay was hard to beat. Office help pulled down $500 a week. Guys in the trades were making as much as $1,800 a week—at least double what they would have earned in the lower forty-eight. Overtime was the norm, especially during the long days of summer when six ten-hour days was the rule. Those who stuck it out for six months, twelve months, or more usually went back home with a sizable nest egg, provided that they hadn’t spent too much on the few diversions that Valdez had to offer.
“Oil and alcohol,” boasted one ample-bellied Texan on one of the subcontract crews, “that’s what Alaska runs on.” And when either of those commodities failed, there was always companionship to be had for a price. It was uncanny. It really was the gold rush all over again right down to the isolation that gripped Valdez when winter storms closed the road to Anchorage and grounded the planes. One October when the movie of the evening turned out to be One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, the irony of slave-prisoners serving indeterminate sentences was not lost on the audience. But at least in Valdez, or anywhere along the line, the workers knew when their time was up. In the meantime, they got fed steaks and paid top dollar. There were, however, only just so many nights in a row that one could get plastered. Psychologically, there were some definite parallels to the gulag, especially when the phones went down or the mail was late.49
The centerpiece of the Valdez terminal area was the initial eighteen storage tanks for oil, lining terraces blasted out of bedrock on the mountainside. Each had a capacity of 510,000 barrels, was 250 feet in diameter and 62 feet high, and had a cone-shaped roof designed to withstand heavy snow loads. The tanks were paired off and surrounded with containment dikes capable of holding 110 percent of their volume. Three other, slightly smaller tanks, also cone-roofed, were each 250 feet in diameter, 48 feet high, and with a capacity of 430,000 barrels. This was the BTA—the Ballast Treatment Area.
Tankers without a load ride high in the water and bob about like a matchbox. A good wave might swamp them. The answer was to take on a partial load of seawater as ballast for stability on the empty run north. When the tankers arrived in Valdez to take on a load of crude, the seawater ballast was jettisoned. The problem, of course, was the oil that had been in the tanks from the last run prior to taking on the seawater ballast. No matter how hard the pumps sucked unloading the crude, some of it remained in the tanks to mix with the seawater ballast. Take a 1-million-barrel capacity tanker, leave just 0.5 percent of its load clinging to its tanks, mix with seawater and discharge, and suddenly you have a 5,000-barrel oil spill.
The final right-of-way agreement prohibited the discharge of tanker ballast anywhere, but what to do with it? The solution was an enormous ballast treatment area at Valdez. The seawater ballast of incoming tankers was pumped into a tank and allowed to stand for several hours. The majority of the oil floated to the surface and was skimmed off and mixed with the supply coming down the pipe. The remaining seawater was pumped through a filtering and chemical treatment process until it contained less than ten parts of oil per million. Finally, the water was gradually discharged into Valdez Arm.50
Vic Filimon, Alyeska manager of terminal construction at Valdez, summed up the special challenges of Alaska construction this way: “Nothing that we’re building here is all that new,” Filimon confessed, “but it’s the bigness of the place and the strictness of the specifications. Everything here is being built to withstand 90-pound snow loads, 90-mile-per-hour winds, and an earthquake of 8.5 on the Richter scale.” There were, of course, the inevitable surprises—what Filimon called “the consistency of the inconsistency of the rock.” Bedrock for the foundations of the oil storage tanks was first thought to be about eight feet down. By the time they were through, some foundations were down forty-five feet.51
There were man-made hassles as well. The quality of the welds on the pipeline became such a source of confusion and cost overruns that even Congress held hearings on the subject before it was resolved. The problem was one of both actual workmanship and subsequent documentation. There were about 65,000 welds in the 800 miles of pipeline. In normal pipeline construction, it was standard practice to take random x-rays of about 10 percent of the welds, except those at river and highway crossings, which were x-rayed at a 100 percent rate. On the Alaska pipeline, the protocol was 100 percent testing—in other words, x-ray and document each and every weld—all 65,000 of them.
When whistle-blowers began to question both the integrity of some welds and sloppy documentation procedures, finger pointing was rampant. In one instance, 358 x-rays of suspect welds were stolen and never found. In another, a project manager for the testing firm was found dead of questionable causes. Part of the challenge became to determine which welds were flawed and which were only poorly documented. By the time that Alyeska had sorted through the mess, thousands of welds were rechecked and in some cases redone—frequently by uncovering and then reburying pipe. The company spent an estimated $55 million on the weld repair program alone. No wonder that just like almost every other construction project since Noah’s ark, the pipeline was over budget—way over budget.52
But the pipeline was getting done. By the end of 1976, almost all of the main line was in place. The pump stations were nearing completion, and Alyeska estimated that the terminal facilities at Valdez were 83 percent complete. Along the line, the workforce began to dwindle as sections were finished and another winter set in, but at Valdez crews continued to work through the dark months to ready the installation for the spring tests. Pressure tests were conducted, and in April 1977 Alyeska announced its intention to begin filling the line with oil later that summer. It was not as easy as turning on a spigot.
For starters, the difference in temperature between the cold pipe and the hot oil had to be balanced. In warmer climes, water would have been put into the line ahead of the oil—separated by a plug that oil workers call a “pig”—to purge the line of air. Water in the Alaska pipeline would likely have frozen solid, so nitrogen was used instead. Unlike oxygen, nitrogen won’t support combustion and thus is safer to use with hydrocarbons. The nitrogen was warmed and inserted into the line under pressure ahead of the pig. As it moved down the line, it warmed the pipe to a temperature compatible with the oil that followed. At the rate of about one mile an hour, Prudhoe Bay crude began its journey south to Valdez on June 20, 1977.
The trip was not without mishap. At pump station 8 about 500 miles down the line from Prudhoe Bay, nitrogen was injected into the pipe without being heated. The cold cracked a pipe bend. Later, while workers were replacing equipment on a pump, oil sprayed all over the place and ignited. One worker was killed, a number were injured, and pump station 8 was heavily damaged.
In Anchorage, St. Patrick’s Catholic Church raised money for its building fund by holding a lottery to guess the exact time that the oil would reach the Valdez terminal. An Anchorage widow won $30,000 with a time of 11:02 P.M. on Thursday, July 28, 1977—thirty-eight days, twelve hours, and fifty-six minutes en route. Incredibly, with the 800-mile line full, there were 9.2 million barrels of oil—roughly eight tanker loads—in the line.53
Meanwhile, earlier that spring the tanker ARCO Fairbanks had operated in and out of Valdez harbor with loads of seawater ballast, serving as a training ship for dozens of tanker captains, harbor pilots, and Coast Guard personnel. It was a process akin to an airplane pilot taking a check ride and making landings at a new airport. Soon it was for real, and the ARCO Juneau took on the first load of Prudhoe Bay crude and sailed south through Valdez Narrows on August 1, 1977.54
At the time, the construction of the Alaska Pipeline was the most expensive private construction project in U.S. history. Having been fed by inflation, the technical demands of permafrost construction, an unprecedented array of environmental regulation, and seemingly endless cost overruns, its original $900-million estimated cost ballooned to over $8 billion before it was completed.
Despite this, as the ARCO Juneau sailed out of Valdez on its first run, there was a lot of cheering and counting of future profits. The oil companies were finally getting their product to market—almost ten years after the original Prudhoe Bay discovery. Royalty and severance tax revenues were about to swell Alaska’s state coffers. Alaska businessmen counted their take from the past few years and looked around for the next boom. Only those who had opposed the pipeline on environmental grounds looked at it with resignation and waited for what would happen next.