Trans-Alaska Pipeline: Eight Hundred Miles Across a Moving Earth

The problem with building a pipeline across Alaska was not the mountains, though the route crosses three of them. It was not the rivers, though the pipe crosses more than eight hundred of them. It was the ground itself.

Prudhoe Bay crude oil moves through the pipeline at between one hundred twenty and one hundred forty degrees Fahrenheit. The permafrost that underlies most of the Alaska Interior is frozen ground, in some places frozen for ten thousand years. If you bury a hot pipe in frozen ground, the ground thaws, destabilizes, and shifts. The pipe breaks.

Engineers solved this by elevating six hundred miles of the pipe on vertical support members fitted with heat pipes, devices that bleed thermal energy from the ground and release it to the air, keeping the permafrost beneath the supports frozen. Where the pipe crosses active fault zones, which in Alaska are numerous, it rides on horizontal sliders that allow it to move up to twenty feet laterally without breaking. The Denali Fault runs across the pipe's path. When it produced a seven point nine magnitude earthquake in two thousand two, the pipeline moved. It did not break.

Construction ran from nineteen seventy-four to nineteen seventy-seven. At peak, eleven thousand workers lived in construction camps along the eight-hundred-mile corridor. On July twenty-eighth, nineteen seventy-seven, the first oil reached the Valdez marine terminal, more than a month after oil first began moving through the pipeline.

The Alaska Permanent Fund, created by constitutional amendment in nineteen seventy-six and funded by a percentage of all oil revenues, has paid an annual dividend to every Alaska resident since nineteen eighty-two. The dividends have ranged from three hundred thirty-one dollars to more than three thousand dollars per person per year. It is the only state-level universal basic dividend program in American history.

The pipeline was built on Alaska Native land. The Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act, signed three years before construction began, had been structured in part to clear the legal path for the pipe.