Subscribe"Jimmy Pedigo, pipeline welder: A lot of people can weld, but can you make that perfect weld, every time, every day, 10 hours a day, month after month after month? It would be like penmanship. You've got a lot of people that can write real pretty. And then some people can't; they can just write to get by. That's, that's the difference. To make a good pipeline welder you've got to have that penmanship.And:
Pete Hughes, pipeline welder: The quality of the work and welding was better on this job than any other job I been on. It had to be. It was inspected more, and they expected more of you. It was publicized; it was a big thing, and everybody was looking down your throat.
Narrator: 798ers were notorious, not only for their skill, but for their attitude. They were the highest paid and most demanding workers on the job.
Bill Howitt: The stories preceded them: very, very talented, very, very arrogant, insisted on their own way... 798ers knew they were good. They knew that we couldn't build this thing without them, and they pushed it a little bit.
Jimmy Pedigo: "Prima donnas" in Alaska; that was a word they used a lot. I know there was a saying up there that happiness was an Okie flying south with a Texan under each arm. So I guess they was referring to, to us, you know.
The welders controlled the pace of work, so whatever they wanted, they got. Winter was coming, and Frank Moolin knew that staying on schedule would get harder as the temperature dropped.
Frank Moolin: You know, Alaska's got some of the worst environmental and weather conditions in the world. It's not unusual to get down to minus 45, minus 50, minus 60 degrees in the wintertime.
Narrator With a little luck, they could work into December before the conditions became impossible.
"Early in 1976 the national media reported that thousands of welds made in the previous year might be fatally flawed.
Walter Cronkite (archival): The Transportation Department, which sets safety standards for all pipelines, opens new hearings tomorrow on the trouble-plagued Alaska Pipeline. Those troubles threaten the fragile Alaskan environment, the timetable for delivering oil to the rest of the country, and the price of that oil.
Narrator: Every one of the 108,000 pipeline welds was supposed to be x-rayed, inspected for flaws, and certified... an enormous task that quickly overwhelmed the companies hired to do the job.
Bill Fowler: One of the subcontractors got behind and pulled a trick that had been learned in the industry long before, is that you find a good weld and you x-ray it 10 or 15 times from a different angle and then call it ten or fifteen different x-rays and then say, well, the next 15 joints are in good shape, now we can move ahead and you get caught up.
When the deception came to light, it was a major scandal and Congress demanded answers from those in charge.
Bill Howitt: It was disastrous because it threw the whole quality control program and quality assurance program for everything on the pipeline into question. It was like, well, if something as simple as an x-ray, you know, can't get done right, what, what else is buried?
Until Frank Moolin's people could sort out which x-rays had been faked, all 30,800 field welds to-date were under suspicion.
By laboriously crosschecking every x-ray, they were able to find the all the duplicates and narrow the number of suspects to 3955. More than half were in buried pipe, some beneath rivers.
Bill Howitt: You're already schedule driven, you've got every resource stressed, all right, now you're going to go out and dig up hundreds of existing places and x-ray them and re-weld them if you have to. And in the case of several river crossings actually go back in a couple of miles under a river and look at the weld.
Narrator: In the end, some 1900 welds needed minor repair. Another thirty-seven had to be cut out and re-done. It was an expensive and embarrassing setback. But the schedule suffered the most damage.
To get the oil flowing in 1977, they had to finish welding pipe before winter set in at the end of 1976, and that was looking more and more doubtful."
So in about four and a half months, if that 400,000 BPD isn't back up online or replaced from some other source, those 55 million barrels will be gone. Obviously it's not going to happen exactly like that, as some of that input will be replaced, and I'm simplifying a lot. 137 days doesn't sound so bad, but there's a lot more that goes into it than just raw numbers... it's all about the logistics.
Total West Coast Consumption (bbl/day):
3,144,000
Less crude oil input after Prudhoe Bay shortfall:
2,744,000
= daily stocks drawdown:
400,000
Out of total stocks:
55,000,000
Days to deplete total stocks:
137.5
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These smart folks think this is pretty bad news.
Note that calling for drilling in the ANWR probably won't help, since it would take too long to ramp up, and besides it would probably have to use the same pipelines.
posted by zoogleplex at 6:57 PM on August 7, 2006