Pipelines: Evolutions and Solutions: We know what comes out, but what goes into a pipeline?

• Author: Anderson, Tasha

A few years ago a friend and I were on a road trip exploring Alaska, somewhere in the vicinity of the Denali Highway. At some point we saw a side road, pulled onto it, got out to walk for a while, and stumbled across one of the locations where the Trans Alaska Pipeline System (TAPS) transitions from above to below ground.

As we walked next to the pipeline, taking a moment to appreciate our first encounter with an iconic piece of infrastructure, I wondered why it would be buried there, in that particular place. To my untrained eye, there weren't any immediate answers.

Of course, when it came to constructing TAPS, there were plenty of trained eyes inspecting every decision about the pipeline's design and construction. And over the nearly forty-five years since TAPS was completed, those and other expert eyes have been guiding the implementation of a multitude of pipelines across the state, utilizing best practices learned from TAPS and innovating new solutions to meet the needs of Alaska's oil, gas, and mining projects.

For most of those projects, the engineering firm of choice is Michael Baker International. "There aren't too many North Slope pipeline projects that we haven't had a hand in," says Chief Pipeline Engineer Paul Carson, who's been with Michael Baker for twenty-five years and worked for Alyeska Pipeline Service Company before that. "There were a couple where we didn't actually do the design, but they brought us in for value engineering."

"Our first North Slope project in Alaska, other than TAPS and prospective gasline projects, was the Alpine project-we were the engineers of record for that," adds Keith Meyer, the company's Arctic Pipeline Technical Authority; he was the first employee in Michael Baker's Anchorage office when it opened to work on the then-proposed Trans Alaska Gas System.

When Is It a Pipeline?

Particularly in Alaska, with the 800-mile TAPS and several proposed major gasline projects over the years, the word "pipeline" invokes images of transporting oil and gas. But pipe is used to transport liquids and gasses for all kinds of applications like sewage systems or natural gas distribution to residences.

So when is it pipe, and when is it a pipeline?

There's no universal delineation. Scott Lust, senior pipeline engineer at Michael Baker, says that if he had to pick a simple definition, in his mind it's a pipeline when the contents are under pressure, while Senior Vice President Jeff Baker conceptualizes pipelines as systems that move a product or commodity.

But Lust and Baker are both speaking to the fact that a pipeline's contents, purpose, and location affect the terms applied to it.

Carson gives the example of "[nonfederally regulated] infield lines, where they are either taking fluid from a well pad to a processing facility or going from the processing facility out for reinjection." He considers them transmission lines, though others might call them distribution lines, "or some of them might be considered gathering lines," he says.

"There are some distinctions in nomenclature and definition which hinge on federal regulations, so we are careful when we're talking about what we call a DOT line, which is going to be federally regulated... A lot of the infield lines, we don't use the same terms per se because we don't want to get anyone confused."

At Michael Baker, "We work almost exclusively under federal mandated code requirements, and they describe the pipelines that we usually concentrate on as transmission pipelines, and that's in opposition to distribution pipelines,"...