Moving oil from OCS to TAPS: Arctic oil could spawn massive new pipeline.

• Author: Hollander, Zaz
• Position: OIL & GAS

Talking about a pipeline to ferry oil from Alaska's Arctic may seem a little premature.

After all, the major producers holding Outer Continental Shelf oil leases have mothballed drilling plans for this year.

Still, despite the current lull, the as-yet hypothetical pipeline remains in play.

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Before any oil makes it to the oil transportation superhighway that is the Trans-Alaska Pipeline System (TAPS), producers will have to permit and build extensive new pipelines to get oil from the Beaufort and Chukchi seas to TAPS.

It would be a monumental project, given the difficult Arctic environment.

Pipelines would trace the rumpled topography of the ocean floor. Close to shore, pipeline design would have to account for floating ice that rams up against land and scrapes long gouges into the seabed.

Terra firma brings different challenges, such as unpredictable permafrost and the likely need for access across the environmentally sensitive reaches of the National Petroleum Reserve-Alaska (NPR-A).

The scale of the project will be worth the expense and inevitable lawsuits, producers say, if they can tap into the huge reservoirs of oil they think the Arctic holds.

The total mileage of pipelines from the Chukchi and Beaufort could rival that of TAPS, which runs eight hundred miles from Prudhoe Bay oilfields to the terminal at Valdez. It's one of the largest pipeline systems in the world.

"The total mileage could be every bit as long as TAPS," Shell spokesman Curtis Smith says. "Everything's big when it comes to offshore."

'Tremendous Timelines'

Royal Dutch Shell doesn't plan any oil drilling in the Arctic until 2014 at the earliest. Shell shelved plans for 2013 Arctic programs after the New Year's Eve grounding of the Kulluk drill rig off Kodiak, an engine fire in the Noble Discoverer rig, and a March federal analysis that urged an Arctic-only approach to exploration as well as stronger safety and environmental safeguards.

Conoco Phillips in April announced that the uncertain regulatory climate prompted the company to shelve its Arctic program. Statoil North America followed suit.

Shell dispatched scientific teams as recently as 2012 to the North Slope and the Northwest Arctic Borough to get a better understanding of where the pipeline would make land and how it would dovetail with TAPS.

It's highly likely any pipelines would need to cross the largely undeveloped ground of NPR-A; regulators and producers say legal challenge is all but...