Cold Oil is Slow Oil: Companies spend billions to keep Alaska oil flowing.

• Author: Wells, Garrison
• Position: OIL & GAS

Every year in Alaska ConocoPhillips builds thirty miles of ice road for oil production in an area called CD5. It costs the company between $18 million and $20 million.

It's nothing new for Alaska's largest oil producer--just another year, another few million dollars.

The company is expert at dealing with the climatological vagaries of the state's northern reaches, where frigid temperatures are the norm and it's customary to expect the unexpected.

Indeed, for companies working in Alaska, dealing with the extreme cold is just part of doing business. They are always on the lookout for better ways to develop oil fields, build facilities, and protect employees in one of the world's harshest environments.

Here is a small sampling of cold climate innovation: Companies are using new internal coating for pipelines; a Finnish company built Polaris, the most powerful icebreaker for the country featuring environmentally friendly dual-fuel engines; and in a race to complete a bridge in a mere two years over a North Slope channel, ConocoPhillips Alaska used new procedures that extended the work season, trimmed man-hours, and helped protect the environment.

Bridging the Nigliq Channel

Alpine, CD5, and the Nigliq Bridge are just the latest examples of how ConocoPhillips devises unique solutions to meet the challenges of working in Alaska. "Alpine is the cutting-edge of development in terms of what a new development looks like," says Jim Brodie, capital projects manager for ConocoPhillips Alaska. "It really focuses on minimizing footprint. It's like an offshore platform, except it only has an ocean three months a year."

Alpine, also known as the Colville River Unit, sits on the western North Slope in the Colville River Delta. It's about eight miles north of Nuigsut, an Ihupiat village. The cost to build it topped $1.3 billion.

It's a lonely, capital-intensive place to conduct business.

There is no permanent road tying the development to other North Slope infrastructure. Every winter, ConocoPhillips must build an ice road to connect with Kuparuk to transport supplies for the rest of the year--as much as 1,500 truckloads of equipment, pipeline, and modules.

CD5 is an extension of Alpine and is the first commercial development in the National Petroleum Reserve-Alaska on Alaska Native lands.

Permitted by the US Army Corps of Engineers in 2011, the Alpine West/CD5 Project was given the funding to go ahead in 2012. The first oil was announced in October 2015.

The...