Brittle Power- PARTS 1-3 (+Notes) - Natural Capitalism Solutions

118Disasters Waiting to HappenTrans-Arabian Pipeline or TAP-Line) presents unique and daunting vulnerabilitiesbecause of its remoteness, length, and special construction. Moreover,there is no known alternative way to move oil from the North Slope to portsand refineries. TAPS is a single forty-eight-inch hot-oil pipeline which costeight billion dollars. It currently moves twelve hundred million barrels perday—about ten percent of U.S. refinery runs—and displaces oil imports worthnearly five hundred dollars per second. Unfortunately, it also runs throughrugged country for seven hundred ninety-eight miles. For four hundred eighteenmiles it is held aloft on stanchions above permafrost. It crosses rivers (fourby long bridges) accessible to boats and to Alaska’s ubiquitous float planes.The five southern pumping stations are also accessible from state highways.The line crosses three mountain ranges and five seismic areas, and passes nearfour massive but mobile glaciers. 151 Its proprietors annually spend about athousandth of the line’s replacement cost on obvious security precautions.Nevertheless, both they and the government acknowledge that—as a 1975 militaryexercise showed—it is impossible to prevent determined sabotage whichcould shut down the line for a year or more. 152Major parts of TAPS are invisible and inaccessible to repair crews by air orground for up to weeks at a time in the winter. If pumping were interruptedfor three winter weeks, the heated oil—nine million barrels of it at one hundredforty-five degrees Fahrenheit—would cool to the point that it could not bemoved, putting the pipeline out of service for six months. It would become“the largest candle in the world” or “the world’s biggest Chapstick.” 153 (Thisreportedly happened to an uninsulated Siberian hot-oil pipeline which broke,plugging it with wax for over a year.) The line need not even be damaged tostop its flow: prolonged gales in the Valdez Narrows could halt tanker trafficfor longer than the storage tanks at the receiving end of the line could accommodate,as nearly happened in 1979. 154 Damage to certain components at theValdez terminal could also deprive TAPS of an outlet for up to a year or two.On 20 July 1977, three dynamite charges exploded under TAPS nearFairbanks without penetrating the pipe wall. Damaged supports and insulationwere discovered five days later. A second bombing in February 1978made a two-inch hole that spilled about fifteen thousand barrels and shutdown the line for twenty-one hours, 155 costing over a million dollars to cleanup. A deliberately opened valve at Station Three, north of the Yukon River,also spilled three and a half thousand gallons of diesel fuel in September1977, 156 adding spice to an extortionist’s threat. And two short sections of pipe,though their half-inch walls were not pierced, reportedly had to be replacedafter being peppered with more than fifty bullets. 157 Despite these incidents,