A couple from Edmonton, Alberta, Canada, came in recently, and shared some interesting work history. The man had worked on electrifying the oil pipeline in Alaska. His Alyeska Pipeline Service jacket was the start of the conversation. It was from the project that his company had worked on in Alaska as they changed the power source to keep the pipeline heated from aircraft motors to electrical systems. I must admit that a lot of his technical explanations came at me more quickly, and at a more scientific level than I could comprehend, so the information I am giving is an approximation of what he said. According to the Alyeska Pipe website, there is this information:
Under the reconfigured system, Alyeska is optimizing its operations by configuring the pipeline to pump up to 1.14 million barrels per day. Alyeska will be able to increase capacity by adding additional pumping units at the electrified stations, using drag reducing agents to improve flow rates, and by bringing additional pump stations online…. Livett said the electrified pump stations will be less expensive to operate because they will be fully automated and standardized to the greatest extent possible…. Livett said that if the project stays on schedule, he anticipates starting some construction work this year. “Our goal is to have the new pump stations electrified and fully automated before the end of 2005,“ Livett said.”
He then went on to talk about more current oil pipeline work in Canada. For fear of messing up the information to an incomprehensible level, I will let you read what the University of Alberta’s website links to an article in the Wall Street Journal in 2005:
FORT MCMURRAY, Alberta — Canada, with its vast oil-sands resource, is gearing up to export more crude oil than ever before. But with Canada’s pipelines just about full, the burgeoning oil-sands industry is running into a bottleneck.
That has touched off a new race: to build massive, expensive pipelines that will carry expanding oil production from this isolated region in northern Alberta hundreds of miles over mountains and forests to the Pacific Coast and major oil-thirsty markets, especially China and the U.S. West Coast….Oil sands are gritty deposits of tar-like bitumen, and Canada’s deposits are now recognized as the biggest source of crude oil outside Saudi Arabia. Extracting and processing sticky bitumen is much more expensive than producing and refining conventional crude, but global supply concerns have pushed crude prices to about $50 a barrel and made bitumen projects more economically viable.
Producers have announced plans to invest some C$80 billion in development of Alberta’s oil sands, according to the Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers in Calgary, and they expect to double production to about two million barrels a day from oil sands by roughly the end of this decade. Some of the world’s biggest energy companies are involved, including Exxon Mobil Corp. and Royal Dutch/Shell Group.
Enbridge wants to build a new pipeline from northern Alberta to a proposed deep-water tanker terminal at Prince Rupert or Kitimat, on the northern British Columbia coast. Either port could accommodate the massive oil tankers with capacities exceeding 250,000 metric tons, or roughly 1.6 million barrels, to ship to China.
One thing that this couple said that I found to be an interesting aside, is that while their American daughter-in-law is having to wait, and wait, to get a “green card” in Canada, Mexican workers are being flown in and fast-tracked to a working visa immediately. Obviously, lesser-paid worker bees are more important to a society than possibly more educated foreigners. When I googled bitunin most of the website listings were in Spanish. One other thing the couple told me was that this tar-like substance, bitunin, is being transported to Chicago to be used in the building industry. Small world-and a global economy.
There are also 450 golf courses in Alberta, so said the woman who is a scratch golfer. They were surprised to find that Oregon had so few (one count I found was just over 100, another included all sizes and said just over 200). I figure almost everyone in Alberta must be so glad when the snow melts, and the temperatures get warmer, that they take to the links, en masse.
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