Anchorage Daily News

Bad weather interfering with tanker loading combined with full storage tanks at Valdez forced a shutdown of the trans-Alaska oil pipeline Monday night.

Operators stopped pumps along the 800-mile pipeline at 8 p.m.. and planned to hold the line idle for six hours, until 2 a.m., in hopes the wind and waves abate around the tanker dock, said Michelle Egan, spokeswoman for Alyeska Pipeline Service Co., which runs the pipeline.

Two tankers are berthed in Valdez now and will begin taking on oil at 8 a.m. today weather permitting, Egan said.

If conditions don't improve, the pipeline might be idled for another six hours, she said.

Pipeline operators have been grappling with two problems since the weekend.

First, tankers can't be loaded when bad weather makes deploying boom around docked tankers too dangerous, or when waves slosh over the boom, rendering it ineffective for containing a spill.

Second, the enormous oil storage tanks at the tanker port have been filling up because ships haven't been able to load since Sunday morning, Egan said.

At the time of the shutdown Monday night, the tanks were filled to 91 percent of capacity, she said.

Oil companies on the North Slope began to throttle back on oil production Sunday, but pipeline operators finally decided the six-hour shutdown was necessary due to the storage crunch and the inability to load ships, Egan said.

This isn't the first time the pipeline has been idled due to weather menacing the tanker dock. High wind and waves forced a shutdown in November 2006.

The pipeline has been moving about 750,000 barrels of North Slope crude oil per day through December.

The operator, Alyeska, is an Anchorage-based consortium of companies that own shares in the pipeline, which started up in 1977. The owners are BP, Conoco Phillips, Exxon Mobil, Chevron and Koch Industries.

BP, Conoco and Exxon each operate a fleet of huge, double-hulled tankers that haul oil from Valdez to West Coast refineries.

Find Wesley Loy's commercial fishing blog online at adn.com/highliner or call 257-4590.

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