Dispute Over Clean Air Temporarily Slows Flow of Alaska Oil to West Coast

It looked for a moment as if the Trans-Alaska Pipeline might shut down Thursday--threatening oil supplies for the West Coast--but a crisis was averted after a court decision.

As a deadline for meeting federal air pollution laws passed Thursday, state and federal environmental officials found themselves eyeball to eyeball with the pipeline’s operators. The federal Environmental Protection Agency had set Thursday as the deadline for Alyeska Pipeline Service Co. to comply with the federal Clean Air Act or face action that could have included fines of up to $25,000 per day per violation.

Alyeska was not so impolitic as to make a direct threat, but the company that operates the 800-mile pipeline went so far as to curtail the flow of oil for about 4 1/2 hours Thursday afternoon, to as low as 1.2 million barrels per day from the normal rate of 1.8 million barrels.

Alyeska suggested at one point that the oil flow might be cut completely.

Fortunately for California, which gets about 47% of its crude oil from Alaska, that didn’t come to pass.

Officials of Alyeska, which is owned by seven major oil companies, won a reprieve from a federal court judge Thursday afternoon that effectively put the deadline on hold. A hearing is scheduled for July 27 to consider a further delay in enforcement of EPA rules. Late Thursday, Alyeska agreed to boost the flow of Alaskan oil to its normal levels.

Meanwhile, officials of the Alaska Department of Environmental Conservation said they had reached agreement with Alyeska to proceed with talks aimed at getting Alyeska to meet the state’s own clean-air requirements.

At issue were charges leveled last month by the state Department of Environmental Conservation and the EPA that Alyeska is producing improper levels of air pollution from pump stations along the pipeline and from oil storage tanks at Alyeska’s marine terminal in Valdez, Alaska.

Alyeska denies that curtailing pipeline operations was meant as a threat. “If we couldn’t be in compliance by midnight deadline, the only way not to be out of compliance would to not be running,” said an Alyeska spokeswoman who requested anonymity.

But state and EPA officials said they saw no reason Alyeska needed to curtail oil flow. “I think that they wanted to crank up some leverage,” said Dennis Kelso, Alaska state commissioner for environmental conservation. “The state’s requirements did not in any way cause them to have to shut down the pipeline. That was their decision; I don’t know what their motivation was, but it was wholly unnecessary.”