Stakeholders in Valdez are embroiled in a dispute over oil spill protections at the terminal there, at the end of the trans-Alaska pipeline, where tankers load up on crude bound for the Lower 48.
On one side are the City of Valdez and the Prince William Sound Regional Citizens Advisory Council. On the other, Alyeska Pipeline Service Company, which operates the pipeline and terminal.
The city and the watchdog group worry that aging safeguards -- like an asphalt liner beneath massive oil storage tanks -- would no longer be effective at preventing an oil spill from reaching the sound. They want Alyeska to replace the liner, or at least fully inspect and repair it.
Northern Journal reporter Max Graham has been following the back and forth as a review of Alyeska's contingency plan plays out. Graham says some observers think a spill from the tanks could rival that of the infamous 1989 Exxon-Valdez oil spill.
This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.
Max Graham: These tanks are huge. I mean, each tank is capable of storing, like, twice as much oil as was released during the Exxon Valdez disaster. And so the worst case, most catastrophic kind of spill you could imagine would be a ton of oil.
That said, Alyeska (Pipeline Service Co.) says the likelihood of that is like, very small, and it wouldn't all go into the sound. I mean, the worry is that it would just sort of seep into the ground and then possibly contaminate groundwater and eventually make its way into the ocean.
Casey Grove: What is Alyeska's, what is their plan, you know, in the event of some type of spill? What kind of equipment, what kind of plan do they have to deal with that?
MG: Yeah, they have a ton of equipment, and they do trainings, and they inspect these tanks, and they say they just are prepared. And state law requires that they have all kinds of these sort of contingencies in place. And that's actually what this dispute has arisen from, is a plan that Alyeska submits to regulators every five years that outlines all these things, and the liner is a part of that. But the question at hand here is, really, is this liner doing its job?
CG: So what do we know about the integrity of that liner?
MG: The city of Valdez, you know, in their appeal to the state, says not much. Like only 1% of the liner has been inspected, they say, over the last 48 years, and of that 1% there have been holes and leaks detected in the past. And the request here from the city is for Alyeska to fully inspect it and repair it, if not fully replace it with a new kind of liner.
CG: Now, I imagine Alyeska would say that that's a huge job, right? I mean, how would they even go about doing that?
MG: Yeah, so I reached out to Alyeska, and they wouldn't really comment on the details of the dispute while it's playing out with regulators in front of an administrative judge. Still Alyeska, will say, and has said publicly that the likelihood of a major spill is vanishingly small. It's something like, they would expect something like that to happen maybe once in every 100,000 years.
And there's no question that the work of replacing the liner would be a lot. It's 50 acres, and it's buried beneath several feet of soil and gravel. So it's hard to imagine how you could just sort of rip it all up beneath these tanks that are critical pieces of infrastructure for the whole pipeline system, without, you know, causing some kinds of major interruptions. And I haven't seen any sort of cost estimate about how much that would cost, but yeah, it seems like there's no question that it would be an enormous task.
CG: Just logistically, whether they have to get down under these massive tanks and look at this liner over this huge area, how would they do that?
MG: Yeah, there are two different techniques that that they've proposed at different times. One is, effectively, you put an electrode in the ground, and then you send this electric current around the liner, and then you can sort of see if the current moves through any leaks or holes in it, and that kind of gives you a sense of the integrity. And then another method that Alyeska has proposed more recently is a sort of hydraulic test where they flood it, and then find leaks that way, just with water. And what exactly they'll do is still, they're still discussing that, negotiating that, with regulators, and the state has not yet fully approved any kind of comprehensive inspection plan.
