NARRATOR: Alaska, the frozen
frontier, where ice and snow cloak huge deposits of oil. 1973, oil shortage, gas
crisis, and the nation desperate for Alaskan crude. The risky solution, a
pipeline across 800 miles of pristine wilderness,
active fault lines, and a hostile terrain. Now, the challenge of the
Alaskan oil pipeline on "Modern Marvels." [music playing] This is what 75
degrees below zero looks like above
the Arctic Circle. When temperatures drop this
low, living, merely being becomes a struggle. Exposed flesh freezes
and dies in 10 minutes. Fingers freeze solid in only 90. ARCTIC EXPLORER: I took my
mitten off and instantly wished I hadn't. The cold was horrible, and
sank through my skin, freezing in place all the nerves
and tendons beneath it. The limb was soon useless to me. The viscous fluid
of my eyes felt as though they were freezing
over and turning to glass. Diary entry, an arctic explorer. NARRATOR: In 1958, two oil
companies seemingly defied common sense by
exploring for oil in this harsh and
unforgiving place. 10 years later, the two oil
companies, Humble Oil, now Exxon, and Atlantic
Richfield, announce they have discovered the largest
oil field in North America. The oil is in Alaska, just
beneath its Prudhoe Bay, and there are close
to 10 billion barrels waiting for them, a
staggering total of over 420 billion gallons of fuel. The area around Prudhoe Bay is
known as Alaska's North Slope, located deep within
the Arctic Circle. It is a timeless wilderness that
has gone virtually untouched by man. The nearest human contact
is some 500 miles away. At the same time,
as public awareness of environmental issues grows,
so does pressure on lawmakers to begin creating
legislation that will protect the
environment from its most willful offenders. Often, that was big industry. Events came to a head when a
nationwide rally is called. It became known as Earth Day. GAYLORD NELSON: 20 million
people demonstrated. This was the first time the
public had an opportunity to express their concern
about the deterioration of the environment, which the
political establishment hadn't been paying any attention to. And for the first time,
the environmental movement as a whole began
to take on muscle. So they were well-prepared
at the time of the discovery of oil in Prudhoe Bay in
1968 to take it head-on. NARRATOR: The people had
spoken, and the government began to listen. In Washington, plans were
to establish a watchdog organization. An Environmental Protection
Agency began to take shape, along with a host of
landmark legislation setting federal standards for
clean air and clean water. The oil companies announced
that they intended to build an 800-mile-long
pipeline that would cut a path through the very heart of
the state, southward to Valdez. To environmentalists,
crude could be applied to the
whole unseemly plan, not just to what would be
flowing through its steel pipe. By the end of 1968, groups such
as the Friends of the Earth and the Wilderness Society vowed
to bring a halt to the proposed project. We took the last great
place, and we put this thing across it. And that is an indication of our
casual contempt for something as important, as fragile, as
ecologically irreplaceable as the great heart of Alaska. NARRATOR: But the oil companies
involved in exploring the North Slope moved quickly
to form a partnership to share in the huge expanse
of this mammoth undertaking. The partners were now
known collectively as Alyeska, the given name for
Alaska by its Aleut Indians. It translates as great land. An order went out for 800
miles of pipeline 48 inches in diameter, the only size
thought capable of withstanding the immense pressure of the
two million barrels of oil that would be pumped
through it each day. The 550,000 tons
of pipeline would have to be shipped on huge
barges from steel plants in Japan at what was considered
an exorbitant price, $100 million. When the cost of
the construction eventually soared
to over 9 billion, this was considered the
pipeline's one and only true bargain. But with the arrival of
pipe supplies and crews also comes lawsuits
and injunctions against construction from
concerned environmentalist groups. It is a test of the newly
signed National Environmental Protection Act, NEPA, which
will set legal standards on all projects having an
effect on the environment. The freewheeling days of the old
oil monopolies were long gone. Oil companies no longer simply
got whatever they wished. The public now had a
greater say in the matter. GAYLORD NELSON: The oil
companies did not, in my view, anticipate the vigor of the
opposition they would have in building this pipeline. But I think they were
initially surprised by that. NARRATOR: To Alaskan natives
and environmentalists, the oil companies seem less
interested in protecting nature than they do their profits. Careful examination
will need to be made if the plan is to proceed. JAY HAMMOND: And I think,
because of the actions of the environmentalists
in asserting they would sue unless certain construction
design remedies were incorporated into the
project, that we would have had a much less successful
pipeline venture than we now have. NARRATOR: By April 1970, less
than 10 months after ARCO's announcement to
build a pipeline, construction stops before
it ever truly begins. Congress and the courts
put a halt to the project. The pipeline isn't so much
in Alaska as it is in limbo. [music playing] Alaska is a larger-than-life
place that has always attracted dreamers and hard-soled
men of action, all scheming to make fortunes
off its generous lands. The Russians had practiced
this philosophy long before America did. During the late 1700s,
Alaska was a part of Russia, and served as her base for the
booming fur trade, the richest enterprise in the world. A single sea otter skin
could equal three times the average Russian's
yearly income. By 1866, Russia was
in near financial ruin due to her military
humiliation at the hands of France's Napoleon
III in the Crimean War. Russia needed money, badly. Knowing this, American Secretary
of State William Seward began urging President Andrew
Johnson to purchase Alaska as a source of
great natural wealth for the growing young republic. The price was a
steal, $7 million. Broken down, it worked
out to $0.02 an acre. The smart thinkers of the
day thought it was too much. Seward was labeled an
idiot in the newspapers. They call the treaty
Seward's Folly. Seward prevailed, and
finally convinced Congress to purchase Alaska. By the turn of
the century, money was flowing back to
the rest of America in the form of whaling, timber,
and the Alaska gold rush. By 1898, more than $300
million in Klondike gold had been extracted from
Alaska's fertile ground. By the year of its admission
to statehood in 1959, Seward's Folly had
already made a $50 billion return on the government's
initial investment. In another 10 years, that
figure would double itself, not in gold, but in black gold. The state of Alaska receives
more in oil taxes and royalties every two days than
the 7.2 million paid to Russia to
purchase the territory. The history of oil
is a happy accident, beginning with the industry's
first wildcatter, Edwin Drake. MICHAEL LYNCH:
Edwin Drake was what we would call an entrepreneur. In the 19th century, he would
be called a fortune hunter. He went out looking
for ways to make money, and essentially, he drilled
the first modern oil well. NARRATOR: Instead
of simply mopping up the oil seeps on the surface,
as others were doing, Drake was the first to see
what might lie below the ground with his drill. He used a water drilling
technique, which was basically hammering a pipe
into the ground. Until Drake, people had
been using whale oil to light their lanterns. But whales were being hunted
down at a tremendous rate. It was a lighting source
that was literally doomed for extinction. A larger, more readily available
source for lighting was needed. Drake's investors looked
to Titusville, Pennsylvania to make their fortune. Here, oil freely floated up from
the Earth in a place called Oil Creek. The local Indians, the
Seneca, knew about oil, and used it for
medicinal purposes. Later, the white man
would bottle the stuff up and call it snake oil, a
play on the word Seneca. Drake dug deeper, but time
and money were running out. The well looked to be a dry one. Drake's investors wanted to
pull out and cut their losses. A letter was sent
to Drake advising him to pay his remaining
bills and close the operation by the end of the day. Fortunately for Drake,
the mail was late. Drake didn't get the
letter until the next day, just as oil began
flowing from his well. The history of the
modern oil industry had been a mere 12 hours
away from being dramatically altered. As for Drake, the wildcatter
title was well earned. He took all the money that he
earned from that very first well, and spent every last
dime looking for another one. Drake died 21 years
later at the age of 61, absolutely penniless. [music playing] Now that Drake had shown
that oil could be tapped, the trick became finding a
way to get it from the field into people's homes. Americans were developing
a quick addiction to oil. ADAM SIEMINSKI:
The quantity of oil that was being demanded by
consumers was rising very rapidly, and oil had, for
the most part, been shipped literally in barrels. And then those tanks were
being hauled around by wagons. And then that was too
slow and not enough, and they started loading
this on the railroads. NARRATOR: It was
because of the railroads that America's first
oil pipeline was built. John D. Rockefeller
was an oil tycoon, but he also controlled most
of the railroads that traveled between Pennsylvania and
the oil-thirsty cities along the Eastern Seaboard. Because of this
power, Rockefeller was able to dictate what
freight fees were charged to his smaller oil-producing
competitors, fees that took a big bite out
of their profits. Rockefeller's competition
organized themselves into a group called
the Independents. The Independents seized
upon a radical new idea-- build a 100-mile-long pipeline,
and let their fortunes flow virtually to their
customers' doorsteps. ADAM SIEMINSKI:
People really didn't know how to build pipelines,
either, in the early days of the oil industry. Some of the first
pipelines were built out of trees that were bored out so
that you had wooden pipelines. Then manufactured steel, cast
iron pipelines were being used. NARRATOR: But Rockefeller
wouldn't go down without a fight. He delayed their construction
any way he could, including blocking the path of
their pipeline with his trains. When that failed to make
the competition fold, Rockefeller decided to beat
them at their own game. MICHAEL LYNCH:
Rockefeller, in fact, began by building a
competing pipeline, because he realized that you
could not possibly control the production of the oil,
but if you control what's called the downstream aspects,
the shipping and the refining, then you would
control the market. So he actually put the
Independents' pipeline out of business by building
a bigger and more efficient pipeline. NARRATOR: The entire
fledgling oil industry quickly realized that pipelines
were the most efficient way of delivering oil to the public. By 1880, more than
75% of America's oil was being transported
by pipelines. 60 years later, another
important pipeline would be built to deliver
oil to the East Coast. It was called the Big
Inch, and its purpose was to deliver fuel
to America's war ships as they set sail for
battle in Europe. By 1880, oil had gone from being
used as a medicine to lighting an entire nation. But it was soon to be put to
an even more extraordinary use. [music playing] Edwin Drake had been looking for
oil to light lamps by kerosene. As kerosene is
refined, a byproduct is produced-- gasoline. Until the combustion engine
was invented in 1892, gasoline was considered a waste
product of no use to anyone. The oil and automobile
industries rapidly changed America's energy needs. In the first 40 years of the
existence of the automobile, there were an astounding
24 million cars in use in the United States. In the post World War
II years, that number increased to 90 million. More than 28 billion
gallons of oil were being consumed by
Americans every year. The American love affair
with the automobile had firmly taken root. MICHAEL LYNCH: The soldiers
came back, they had cheap loans, they started buying
things, the economy boomed. People switched
from tanks to cars, they switched from
bombers to prefab houses. Levittown, the great
suburb was developed. The result was that you
had a marriage, really, between the economy, the
automobile industry, which was the biggest industry,
and then the oil industry, which is really pretty much
the second biggest industry. When President Eisenhower
initiated the Federal Highway Act, it gave America a modern
set of roads that would link it from coast to coast. Detroit automakers
encouraged folks to get out and
discover the country, and Americans did,
including Alaska. Improvements were underway on
the Alcan Highway, the Lower 48's direct link to its
newest state via Canada. For some, the
Alaskan-Canadian highway went a long way to paving
the way for the Alaskan oil pipeline. JAY HAMMOND: Certainly
construction of the highway, the Alcan Highway,
conditioned folks to accept a major project that
would cut across wilderness country. And some of us,
including myself, again felt that,
since we already had an incursion into
a wilderness area through the highway, why not put
the pipeline parallel down it? NARRATOR: The fortunes of a
nation and the oil industry were tied. They grew together at a 1 to 1
ratio during those heavy boom years. Oil's influence was
felt everywhere. Cars, appliances, homes--
everything ran on the power that oil provided. And by the late 1960s,
America's appetite for oil far outstripped its
domestic supply. Most of the oil
consumed by Americans did not come from within
their own borders. Dependence on foreign-produced
oil from the Middle East had been growing steadily
for over a decade. America needed a solution
to its growing problem, and the Alaskan oil pipeline
seemed to offer a solution. But with environmental issues
still clouding the picture, its future looked bleak. Little could anyone
suspect how significant a role the actions
of a few oil sheiks would play in deciding the fate
of the Alaskan oil pipeline. During the 1990s, 1/10 of
all oil used by Americans passed through the
Alaskan oil pipeline. It wasn't politicians
in Washington or engineers in Anchorage
that changed the fate of the Alaskan pipeline. It was the actions taken by a
small group of Middle Eastern oil sheiks from OPEC, the
Organization of Oil-Exporting Countries. MICHAEL LYNCH: So you had
this situation where the oil companies were ready to
construct the pipeline, and they faced such strong
environmental opposition they simply could not proceed. Then, they received the very
nice gift of an oil crisis. NARRATOR: Two and three-hour
lines at gas stations became the norm. Gas crunch, odd/even days, and
rationing became buzzwords. In 1973, OPEC was a dirty one. The oil embargo cemented
in everyone's minds the need to end America's
dependence on foreign oil. The issue was larger than
just a lack of cheap gasoline. MICHAEL LYNCH: This did
a lot of economic damage. It's the same as
if you have a tax. You take money out of
the pockets of consumers, they can't spend as much. They don't buy things,
factories cut back, factories lay off workers,
you get a recession. And the oil crisis
was really the end of the post-war economic boom. America's energy demands have
grown so rapidly that they now outstrip our energy supplies. As a result, we face the
possibility of temporary fuel shortages and some increases
in fuel prices in America. This is a serious challenge. NARRATOR: If the spigot
could be turned on, over 25% of the nation's oil supply would
come flowing daily from Alaska. A country gripped by inflation
and high unemployment would also gain over 70,000
jobs, an important boom in bad times. Opposition to the pipeline
was quickly fading. [music playing] For more than four
decades, oil companies had been searching
for oil in Alaska. Its existence had
been known for years. The Eskimos, like the
Seneca, had been using oil as a caulk for their canoes. But with discovery of oil comes
equal parts joy and dread. Oil is many times
a mixed blessing. JAY HAMMOND: They'd known about
oil in Alaska since the 1920s. There were wells punched,
I think, in 1922. And you can see
evidence of that still. Some of the old trails
and drilling devices are still in place. NARRATOR: Exploring for oil had
never been a cheap endeavor. Years of wildcatting
often resulted in nothing more than empty hunches
and a flatter wallet. Today's average well costs
$5 million before any return might be seen. Oil production in remote
areas like the Arctic Circle and the North Sea were even
more expensive to explore. By the '60s and '70s, that
was no longer the case. With demand high and the
financial returns great enough, oil companies were stretching
their search ever outward. For one pioneering
explorer, British Petroleum, the wildcatting spirit
of Edwin Drake lived on. BP had been the sole company
looking for oil along Alaska's arctic coastline. And since 1958,
British Petroleum had acquired leases on
hundreds of thousands of state-owned acres
around the North Slope. For 10 long years, every
well that had been dug had come up dry. And by 1968, they had pulled up
stakes and abandoned any hope of hitting oil. Nearby, Arco's luck was better. Using a derrick that British
Petroleum had left behind, Arco hit oil. BP's Alaska hunch
was right, they had just been drilling
in the wrong places. British Petroleum came back
to the slope in a hurry. BOB MALONE: They still
owned a number of leases. And when the discovery
was made, Arco volunteered to acquire those
leases, and BP says, no, I think we'll put
one more hole down. And of course, they hit, as
well, in the Prudhoe Bay area. NARRATOR: An oil
fever was raging now. The remaining state
lands in Prudhoe Bay were to be sold at auction. Total amount of
bid, $3,546,292. NARRATOR: The same land that
had gone for only $12 an acre a year earlier was now
fetching well over 2,000. When the auctioning
was complete, Alaska's treasury
had grown wealthier by more than $900 million. With the environmentalists'
voices weakened in light of looming oil
shortages, a go-ahead seemed to be drawing
nearer for the pipeline. Engineers and designers started
focusing on the nuts and bolts of production. And while a pipeline may
have been the favorite plan of the oil companies,
they agreed to look at alternate routes due
to the pressure of concerned environmentalists. JAY HAMMOND: The
Teamsters wanted to have a big four-lane highway
up there so they coult haul it by truck, were talking
about hauling it sub-surface under the ice by submarine,
all sorts of schemes and plans that were laid one by
one to rest, mercifully. NARRATOR: One of those
was the SS Manhattan, a double-hulled tanker with
ice-breaking capabilities. It would be a test
to see if oil could be moved through the straits
of the icy Bering Sea. On its journey northward,
in the summer of 1969, the Manhattan time and again
found itself stuck in ice. The big tanker repeatedly needed
to be rescued by the other ice breakers. At one point during the test
run, a projection of ice managed to rip a giant gash
along its thick steel hull. The Manhattan was empty, but
for a ship capable of carrying 700,000 barrels of oil,
it was an ominous note of the potential dangers of
shipping oil across the sea. While ice breaking tankers
like the SS Manhattan were no longer an option,
tankers as a whole would still have a vital role
to play in the pipeline system. By transporting the
oil through a pipeline, right through the
middle of Alaska, to the ice-free port of Valdez,
we would be able to move tankers through that area 24
hours a day, 7 days a week, without fear of that
area freezing up. So that provided the
most economical and most environmentally sound
route to follow. NARRATOR: Even with
the route chosen, the pipeline faces an
even trickier path ahead. [music playing] Thousands of lawsuits and
environmentalist court challenges threaten to
undermine the project at any step of the way. Unless they are settled,
pipeline construction simply cannot move forward. Among them are lawsuits brought
by Alaska's 200 Indian tribes. The native claims
seek legal assurance that reimbursements will be made
for the pipeline's right of way through Indian Territory. The fate of the pipeline
comes down to one final vote in the Senate. It is the project's last
chance for survival. One radical sweeping
bill can clear-cut the way for the pipeline. GAYLORD NELSON: The
vote was tied at 48-48. And Vice President, Spiro
Agnew, cast the vote in favor of the Gravel Amendment
to cut off further lawsuits. And that was the bill, the
legislation that, in effect, settled the issue and allowed
the pipeline to go forward. NARRATOR: Interestingly,
Agnew's last act as vice president was giving
the pipeline its go-ahead. The 100,000 pieces of pipe
that had been gathering dust on Alaskan docks for
the past six years are finally going
to be put to use. The work stoppage is over. The Trans-Alaska Pipeline
is about to be officially underway. And now that the legal
obstacles have been overcome, it is time to overcome
building on a land known for its devastating earthquakes. When pipeline
construction began, so many people came to
Alaska in search of work that the state government put
ads in newspapers asking people to stay home. The Alaskan pipeline
was an original. There had been nothing
like it before. More than 3 million tons
of machinery and supplies had to be delivered north. Most of it was shipped during
the summer months on giant sea barges to take advantage of the
reduced risk of dangerous ice floes. And that included
crew quarters, all prefabricated in the lower 48. After being tugged
into Prudhoe Bay, they would be towed
off, moved into place, and welded together. Building in the harsh
arctic environment would test engineers' technical
know-how at every turn, beginning with nature that
wasn't going to turn over its bounty without a fight. Its secret weapon was a
little-studied phenomenon called permafrost, soft, silty
soil that is infused with ice. It is any ground that
has remained frozen for more than two years. If it is given the chance
to thaw, the soil around it turns to mud. Pipeline with individual
segments weighing 9,000 pounds apiece simply can't survive
without stable ground beneath it. Oil comes out of the ground at
temperatures approaching 130 degrees. So if the hot oil pipeline
were allowed to come in contact with the permafrost, the
permafrost would melt. The pipeline would need to be
elevated over the frozen ground for more than 400
of its 800 miles. There's also a
very unique system of being able to take the
heat from the pipeline and put it into a jacket
that surrounds the pipeline. That heat would dissipate
by vaporizing as it boiled and vented out the top
so that you actually pull the heat from the pipeline and
didn't impact the permafrost. NARRATOR: And it wasn't
only the permafrost that needed protecting. Environmental groups had
feared that animals would see the pipeline as a sort of fence,
and that migrating habits would be broken. Designers promised
to devise a solution. BOB MALONE: We also had,
though, wildlife to think about, particularly the
migrating caribou herds. So in a number of locations, we
actually elevated the pipeline so that the caribou
could cross under it. In other locations, we put
the pipeline underground, thus creating an area where the
caribou could migrate through. Unique features that aren't
found in most pipelines around the world. NARRATOR: Sometimes,
wild animals like Alaska's brown bear found
themselves migrating right into a work camp. BILL HOWITT: Mostly,
the bear went one way and the person went the
other way almost as fast. Just you'd see each
other, whew, you're gone. NARRATOR: There was one other
obstacle that would need to be considered-- earthquakes. At 5:35 on Good
Friday morning 1964, Alaska suffered through one of
the most powerful earthquakes ever recorded. It registered an explosive
8.4 on the Richter scale, and lasted a gut-wrenching
four minutes. Its energy 800,000
times as great as the bomb that was
dropped on Hiroshima. Downtown Anchorage was
completely destroyed. If permafrost provided
engineers with an unsteady base, how do you build atop one of
the world's largest fault lines? The pipeline, as it crosses
over the Denali fault, is designed to actually
move 20 feet horizontally and as much as five feet
vertically in the event of a seismic event. It's designed to withstand
an 8.5 on the Richter scale. NARRATOR: That
bit of engineering has never been put
to the test, yet. Engineers are
always being asked, if the shortest route
between point A and B is a straight line, why does
the Alaskan pipeline zigzag? The answer is twofold. The zigzag, which is often
exaggerated by telephoto lenses, stabilizes the pipeline
in the event of an earthquake. It also allows room for the
pipe to expand and contract during temperature fluctuations. Living in the out-of-the-way
Arctic meant everything down to the last nut and bolt had to
be thought of and provided for. It wasn't a glamorous life. Small quarters shared with
a bunkmate, cafeteria food, and a couple of TV
channels for a link with the rest of the world. The money was the draw for
most, close to $1,100 a week, double the going
rate in the States. BILL HOWITT: When I
first came to Alyeska, I went through
Arctic orientation. We would take the
little book called "Staying Alive in
the Arctic," we all carried that little book,
and always carry some matches. So at least if you
were freezing to death, you could burn the book "Staying
Alive in the Arctic," you know? NARRATOR: In the course of
two years of construction, more than 70,000 people
worked on the line, 7,000 of them women. For a project this challenging
and trying, it was a safe one. Amazingly, only 31 people died
while building the pipeline. The cold winter months
were fast approaching, and the push was on. More than a year
into construction, five separate crews were
laying a mile of pipe each day. But if the pipeline was
to stay on schedule, the last, most
dangerous miles would have to be conquered
in the dead of winter. Alaskan residents pay
no state income tax. Instead, each person
over six months of age receives an oil dividend check. They averaged $1,000 per
year during the 1990s. wouldTogether, Thompson
Pass and Atigun Pass would come to be known as the
last and most dangerous miles along the pipeline's
tortuous route. BILL HOWITT: Atigun
and Thompson sometimes are talked about
together, but they really are very different places,
and the challenges were really a lot different. They shared one thing
in common, though. They both had to be done by the
winter of 1976 in order for us to start up in 1977. NARRATOR: The
pipeline was scheduled to open in less than six
months, but a failure to finish the work in
Atigun and Thompson passes would mean a delay of
almost a full year. Construction during
the winter months would be impossible
in both places, so if the team missed
their deadline, it would be a long
wait until next summer. BILL HOWITT: It's rainy. It's snowy. It sleets. It's foggy. It's terrible. It's just atrocious conditions. The rocks there
has slippery rock. And so when it's wet
or has snow on it, you just can't
keep your footing. You slip and slide around. It's just a nasty place to work. NARRATOR: Atigun Pass is located
near the start of the line, deep within the Arctic Circle. It is a treacherous land. Avalanches occur here during
the winter on a regular basis. At 4,000 feet, it would be the
highest point that the pipeline must climb to. Because of the threat
of snow slides, the pipeline would be encased
in a mammoth concrete box. A trench was dug right
into the mountain itself, with the granite
acting as a giant concrete [inaudible]. Over 100,000 cubic
yards of dirt were used to backfill the giant
trench, more than enough to fill an entire
football stadium. The plan worked. Thompson Pass presented
a different, but just as harrowing, challenge. The big challenge
at Thompson Pass was the vertical drop, and
the steepness of the drop. The drop is so steep that
conventional Caterpillar tractors, CATs, couldn't
operate on it because their oil lubrication systems weren't even
designed for them to operate on that steep of a slope. Normal machinery
couldn't go up and down. NARRATOR: To get around
the severe 60-degree angle, the engineers devised
a unique system, a makeshift aerial tramway. Men and materials were
actually flown through the air from the bottom to the top of
the two-mile-long sheer wall. BILL HOWITT: The fog
is such that you really don't have good visibility. When the pipe was coming
down the aerial tramway, it would kind of
just appear, you know, like coming out
of a ghostly mist. A little storm would blow
in, and I've seen times when the welders who were
actually working on the pipe were actually hanging off
their safety harnesses. They'd just physically
couldn't get any footing. NARRATOR: As one
worker put it, it was as if nature was putting
up a fight, making you earn whatever you managed
to wrestle out of it. KAY ELIASON: As a
manager, you had to do whatever had to be done to
make sure that Atigun Pass was complete in 1976. The rest was a problem, but
with those two complete, it was a cakewalk. NARRATOR: With both Atigun and
Thompson passes successfully completed, it was time
to hit the start button on the Alaskan pipeline. It was called oil in day. And now, after two
years of construction, 800 miles, $9 billion, and
70,000 workers, the largest and most expensive construction
project was finally completed. On June 20th, 1977,
oil finally began to flow through the
Alaskan oil pipeline. BILL HOWITT: Each time it
went through a pump station, everybody drew off some samples. It was kind of
like tapping a keg. You know, we all
said, hey, we've got to get a sample of this thing.
What have we got? So you went into the mess hall
and you got an old ketchup bottle that'd just
been, you know, emptied [inaudible] a mayonnaise
jar or something like that, because none of us had
anything to put it in. [music playing] NARRATOR: Alaskan crude
begins its 800-mile journey here at pump station number
one, located on the edge of the Prudhoe Bay oil field. And this is where
the pipeline emerges for the first time
from the ground to start its trek to Valdez. There isn't just one well site. There are literally 1,000. Several smaller feeder lines
bring their supply of crude to the pump station, where
they join together to become the Alaskan oil pipeline. Thanks to more advanced drilling
techniques, a wellhead today is no bigger than
a typical toolshed. Gone are the days
of boomtown clutter, and because of horizontal
drilling techniques, a well's footprint is
significantly smaller. Several wells can be
drilled from a single spot, covering thousands
of acres below. A metering system has
been installed here to correctly calculate how
much oil is being brought into the pipeline. If you're a producing
oil company, it's critical to know exactly
how much you're putting in one end because you get paid for
what comes out the other. At its peak of
production, the pipeline was designed to send over 2
million barrels, or 84 million gallons of oil, down the
pipeline every single day. Two giant Rolls Royce turbo
engines, the same as used on jumbo jets, are capable of
pushing over 40,000 gallons of crude oil per minute. The crude travels between
two to four miles per hour, and takes almost five
days to reach Valdez at the end of the line. The pump stations are also where
pigs are placed into the pipe and sent floating downstream. Not the barnyard variety, but
the super sophisticated type. No one remembers exactly how
they got their name, though it might be because the old ones
used to be made of leather and were said to squeal as
they flowed down the pipe. Now, pigs do more
than just scrub and clean the inside
walls of the pipeline. Today's pigs are
used to help crews in preventative maintenance,
looking for small abnormalities in the pipe system before they
can turn into bigger problems. The final stop for the oil is at
the marine terminal in Valdez, the northernmost
ice-free sea port, located at the top of
the Prince William Sound. Drawing from one of its
18 giant holding tanks, each containing more than half
a million barrels of crude, 180,000 barrels of oil
flow through this terminus every single hour, 24 hours
a day, seven days a week. And with four docks
located in Valdez, up to four super-sized
supertankers could be entirely pumped
full of fuel each day. The last critical
component of the system are the supertankers themselves. These floating giants are
responsible for delivering Alaskan oil to the
rest of the lower 48. Today's oil tankers are
the largest manmade objects to freely travel the
surface of the Earth. BOB MALONE: Now, the biggest
one that calls on Valdez is 265,000 deadweight tons. Just to put that
into perspective, that's over 1.8
million barrels of oil that that tanker carries as it
transits through Prince William Sound to market. NARRATOR: Tankers are
not a new phenomenon. They've been used
since the late 1800s, and as the oil industry
grew, so did they. Some of today's supertankers
are over 1,500 feet long and 200 feet wide, the
equivalent of over five football fields in length. ADAM SIEMINSKI: It is
a very efficient way of moving oil long distances. It's much more economic
than pipelines. The biggest problems that
we've had in the United States, actually, with oil
spills have been more from tankers
having problems than we've had from pipelines. [music playing] NARRATOR: March 1989. The world watched in horror
as close to 11 million gallons of crude oil hemorrhaged
from a supertanker onto the pristine shores
of Prince William Sound. GAYLORD NELSON: Exxon "Valdez"
oil spill was the worst nightmare that environmentalists
or anybody else could have, because this is a tremendously
important and productive biological region. The damage was tremendous,
and everything we got out of that pipeline, in my
view, is not worth the damage that that oil spill did. We've been on the verge
of bankruptcy many times prior to the pipeline. Ironically, we've been bailed
out by natural disasters. First was the earthquake in
1964 that poured billions, or millions and billions
of dollars of federal aid. We had another natural disaster
as the Exxon "Valdez" oil spill that pumped millions and
billions of new dollars into the state. Terrible situation to have
to rely on natural disasters for sustaining your economy. NARRATOR: In the eight years
since the Exxon "Valdez" spill, much has changed about the way
tanker operations occur here. There is a fleet of
over 40 sea spill ships standing by at the
ready, 24 hours a day. There are another 300
ships kept under contract in the immediate area that are
also a part of the emergency response team. Ships of every
size and function, from recovery vessels
capable of sucking up more than 2,000 barrels of
oil in an hour to skimmers, tugs, and emergency
response boats ready to deploy
hundreds of thousands of feet of containment
booms in minutes. Unlike procedures in
1989, two tugboats are now assigned to every
incoming and outgoing tanker during their 70-mile transit. Traffic lanes have
also been designated, and are carefully watched
by guidance and control room operators. The people who operate the
Trans-Alaska Pipeline took the Exxon "Valdez"
spill very seriously. And that spill just kind
of shook our organization and our pride to its very core. And we feel we're in a position
to respond if something like that would happen again. But more importantly, that we
can prevent something like that from ever happening again. [music playing] NARRATOR: At
current projections, today's pipeline is due
to be shut down sometime in the next 20 years, once
it's 10 billion barrels of oil have been completely drained. That's close to a 40-year run
as America's premier supplier of oil. In September 1996,
another oil field was discovered alongside Prudhoe
Bay, this one possibly equaling the oil deposit that the Alaskan
pipeline draws its oil from. If the government approves of
further drilling on the North Slope, oil could continue
flowing from pipeline add-ons well into the new millennium. Conservative estimates
set the value of the new find at more than $350 billion. But as in the past,
environmentalists question the need to go into
one of the world's last most pristine environments. Known as ANWR, the Arctic
National Wildlife Refuge, it is 19 million federally
protected acres of land. Is there no point at which
we will not stop and say, wait a minute, this
place cannot be damaged, this place is too important? If we don't hold ourselves
back here, where will we? We might as well start
drilling in Yosemite, because no place is sacred. And it's pointless. It's stupid, and
we shouldn't do it. [music playing] NARRATOR: After 20
years of operation, what is the scorecard on
the Alaskan pipeline today? Technologically, the
pipeline has exceeded anyone's expectations,
pushing arctic engineering to an entirely new level. Spills have occurred
on the pipeline itself, but they have been minor,
measured in gallons, not in barrels. Environmentally, its short-term
impact seems to be minimal. The pipeline seems to have lived
up to its designers' promises. In the long term, only time will
tell if human activity on such a massive scale brings damage
to such a sensitive land. Sociologically, the
pipeline has been a provider of opportunities,
jobs, new schools and hospitals for Alaskan residents, and
a regained independence for America from
foreign influences. When and if the day ever comes
that there is no further need for an Alaskan
pipeline, its charter provides for its complete
removal and restoration of the land to its
original condition. Some 20 years after
its completion, the Alaskan oil pipeline still
generates strong feelings. TH WATKINS: You sort of
have to close your eyes and think about this
thing, cutting like a knife across the heart of the
last great place left on the continent. That is perhaps a psychological
impact whose importance I don't think we begin
to understand yet. MICHAEL LYNCH: It would
have been so much worse without the pipeline. There was a psychological effect
on the American character. Jimmy Carter called it malaise. People felt that we
were losing control. And then the good old American
know-how and engineers built this enormous pipeline,
in a fairly short time. And I think it helped to show
a spirit that we are capable people, that we can
overcome adversity. BILL HOWITT: There's a
memorial to everybody who worked on the pipeline,
and that's the "Valdez". It's really pretty moving. And one day, I went
by the monument there, and we'd had a tremendous snow. And the snow was right up
to the necks of the people, the statues there. And it was kind of
indicative of what it took to build the pipeline. I mean, it looked like those
guys were sitting there going like this, trying to just
stay above water, if you will. And it was perfect. It was perfect. It made me think that's what
building the pipeline was all about, struggling
against those elements and overcoming them. [music playing]
