Rudder cracks dock BP tankers
'DISAPPOINTING': Damage stops new ships from hauling Alaska oil.
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By WESLEY LOY
Anchorage Daily News
Published: May 20th, 2005
Last Modified: May 20th, 2005 at 02:15 AM
Two new double-hulled tankers that haul Alaska crude oil for BP are laid up in a Puget Sound shipyard with cracks in their rudders, including one fissure measuring 9 feet long.
The head of BP's shipping company, Alaska Tanker Co. of Beaverton, Ore., said the cause of the cracks remains a mystery.
One of the ships, the Alaskan Frontier, is expected to be out of service for several weeks pending repairs to cracks in both its rudders. The Alaskan Frontier was the first in a fleet of four new double-hulled tankers that BP is building to carry North Slope crude oil from Valdez to West Coast refineries. The ship went into service last August.
A second and newer ship, the Alaskan Explorer, is expected to be out of service through this week. It has smaller cracks in only one of its twin rudders, the company official said.
The Alaskan Frontier, during its career so far, has hauled about 25 loads of crude oil out of Alaska, while the Alaskan Explorer -- which made an unusual public relations stop in Juneau in April -- has carried only one load, said Anil Mathur, president of Alaska Tanker.
"It's disappointing," Mathur said. "But when you come up with brand new designs, you can have new problems. The important thing was, this was not a catastrophic failure. This is embryonic. The problem has been caught very, very early."
The BP ships are part of efforts by all three of the major oil companies operating in Alaska -- the others are Conoco Phillips and Exxon Mobil -- to create a new generation of spill-resistant tankers. The companies were obliged to build the ships after the disastrous Exxon Valdez oil spill in Prince William Sound in 1989. Congress required all oil tankers to be double-hulled by 2015. The hope is that if the outer hull ruptures, the inner hull will contain the crude.
National Steel and Shipbuilding Co. of San Diego, a subsidiary of General Dynamics, built the Alaskan Frontier and the Alaskan Explorer. The company now is building BP's final two "Alaska Class" tankers, due to come into service by the middle of next year.
BP has touted its new tankers as "the most environmentally friendly oil tankers ever built," featuring not only double hulls but advanced navigation systems and twin engines, propellers and rudders that can power and control the ship in case one system fails. The ships cost $250 million each.
Each tanker can carry up to 1.3 million barrels of crude oil, or more than one day's North Slope oil production.
The steel rudders, like everything about the 941-foot tankers, are jumbo-sized, measuring about 30 feet high and 18 feet wide. They're mounted behind enormous propellers and provide the means of steering the ship through the sometimes rough North Pacific Ocean.
Divers discovered the rudder cracks during a scheduled inspection of the Alaskan Frontier last Saturday, Mathur said. The inspection turned up several cracks in its rudders, the largest measuring 9 feet long.
A subsequent check of the newer sister ship, the Alaskan Explorer, turned up three cracks on one of its rudders, the longest measuring 15 inches.
Both ships are docked at a shipyard in Port Angeles, Wash.
The Alaskan Explorer is expected to return to service by week's end, once the cracks are repaired, Mathur said. As a precaution, he added, a tug will escort the empty ship when it enters Prince William Sound. Normally, only tankers loaded with oil and headed out of the Sound get tug escorts.
Divers also will inspect the rudders on every voyage, he said.
Donna Schantz, of the Prince William Sound Regional Citizens' Advisory Council, an oil industry watchdog agency, applauded the extra tug escort.
"We definitely feel that's a necessary safeguard," she said.
Fixing the Alaskan Frontier is a bigger challenge. Mostly likely, that ship will need to go to a shipyard with larger ship-handling cranes in Vancouver, British Columbia. There, workers will tip the vessel to better expose the rudders. They'll remove the rudders for repairs, and the tanker likely will be out of service until July, Mathur said.
Alaska Tanker has a stable of eight ships, including the two new double-hulled tankers, and the company plans to use two older ships that had been slated for retirement to avoid interrupting crude oil deliveries, he said.
The company has put together a team of shipbuilders, engineers and inspectors to try to determine what caused the cracks. Mathur declined to speculate, but said problems can be expected in a new class of ships.
"It's really important to understand how this happened, so that the fix takes care of the underlying cause," he said. |
