The Alaska pipeline must keep oil moving or it could freeze solid
An 800-mile steel pipe carries crude from Prudhoe Bay on the Arctic coast to the port of Valdez. It was built to deliver more than 2 million barrels a day, but now runs at around 470,000. That drop poses a peculiar risk: if the flow slows too much or stops, the line itself could freeze.
Oil on Alaska's North Slope was no secret. The Iñupiat had dug oil-soaked peat for perhaps thousands of years as fuel for heat and light, and a Hudson's Bay Company officer, Thomas Simpson, noted seepages in 1836. After the First World War, as the Navy switched its ships from coal to oil, President Warren G. Harding set aside naval petroleum reserves, including a vast Reserve No. 4 south of Barrow. Surveys on foot in the 1920s and wartime exploration from 1944 found oil fields, but none worth developing.
Commercial success came first in the south, at the Swanson River field near Kenai, drilled by Richfield Oil four years after the Navy stopped its survey. Engineers grew convinced the land beyond the Brooks Range held much more, and in 1968 oil was found at Prudhoe Bay. The 48-inch pipe was ordered from Japan the following year because American mills lacked the capacity, but legal and environmental fights held up construction for nearly five years.
The eight companies holding the oil rights gave Bechtel the job of designing and building the line, while Fluor took on the terminal at Valdez and all 12 pump stations. Crews spent 1973 and 1974 building camps, roads and bridges and routing the corridor around awkward river crossings and animal habitats, then built the system from 1975 to 1977. It was one of the first big projects to grapple with permafrost, requiring new techniques for frozen ground. High pay, long hours and free housing drew tens of thousands of workers, turning Valdez, Fairbanks and Anchorage into boomtowns.
The first barrel travelled the line in the summer of 1977. Since then it has suffered leaks from sabotage, maintenance failures and even bullet holes, and by 2026 it had moved over 19 billion barrels. The privately owned Alyeska Pipeline Service Company runs it, and proposals to extend it toward drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge remain controversial.
Source: Trans-Alaska Pipeline System
