Oil Cleanup May Last Into Winter

Cleanup workers will likely spend much of the winter digging up frozen, contaminated soil and chopping down oil-coated trees at the site where crude oil sprayed out of a bullet hole in the trans-Alaska pipeline, officials said Wednesday.

Workers may have to clear-cut the spruce and birch forest site affected by the spill, then plant new trees and bushes next spring, said Tim Woolston, a spokesman for Alyeska Pipeline Service Co., the consortium that operates the pipeline system.

Alyeska has already spent about $3 million on the cleanup, Woolston said, and the cost is expected to mount. “Certainly that will go up significantly,” he said.

The spill totaled 6,800 barrels, or 285,600 gallons. It was the largest spill along the trans-Alaska pipeline in 23 years, and the third-largest in the state since oil began flowing through the 800-mile line. It started last Thursday, when a gunman used a high-powered rifle--which state officials identified as a .338-caliber magnum--to pierce the oil line at its midpoint, about 50 miles north of Fairbanks.

Although bullets have struck the oil line in the past, this was the first time that one had punctured it.

A local man, Daniel Lewis, 37, was arrested by Alaska state troopers, charged with the shooting and related offenses and jailed in Fairbanks.

Cleanup workers, using vacuum trucks and containment pits, have so far picked up 2,772 barrels, or 116,424 gallons, of the oil as of Wednesday, the Alaska Department of Environmental Conservation said. No impacts to wildlife have been reported, partly a result of timing, said Brad Hahn, DEC’s manager for prevention and emergency response.

“All the migratory birds are out,” he said. No oil has been found in nearby water bodies either, though officials are concerned about possible leaching into ground water, Hahn said.

Long-term prospects for the area, about two to three acres in size, are complicated by the intermittent permafrost underlying it, he said. There will be consultations with plant experts to determine the best course of action, Hahn said.

“We want to do the least amount of disturbance possible,” he said.

Like Alyeska, the state has borne a cost from the near-shutdown of North Slope oil production in the days after the hole was detected. The pipeline was shut down from late Thursday to early Sunday, when the bullet hole was plugged with a permanent weld. During most of that time, North Slope output was down to 5% of its normal 1 million-barrels-per-day rate.

The delayed production of about 2.7 million barrels means the state will lose $8.35 million in oil royalties and taxes, said Chuck Logsdon, chief petroleum economist for the Alaska Department of Revenue.

The state would lose more if cleanup expenses were figured into the transportation tariff that oil producers subtract from the wellhead price used to calculate royalties and taxes, Logsdon said.

“If it gets applied to the tariff, the state shares in some of that cost,” he said.

Lewis was charged with criminal mischief, drunk driving, assault and misconduct involving a weapon--charges he has faced often for other incidents in the past, according to police records.

He “will be prosecuted to the full extent of the law,” said Bob King, press secretary for Gov. Tony Knowles. But the state’s priority is the spill cleanup, King said.

Alyeska is owned by oil companies with interests on the North Slope. Major owners are BP, Phillips Petroleum Co. and Exxon Mobil Corp.