ost everywhere Alaskans live, at least one farm is nearby. No, not the approximately 762 farms that raise crops and livestock for sale (the smallest number in any state). Tank farms, or above-ground storage facilities, are essential infrastructure wherever fuel or other liquids must be stockpiled. The Alaska Department of Environmental Conservation regulates sixty-five tank farms with capacities greater than 5,000 barrels of crude oil or 10,000 of non-crude. Below that, the US Environmental Protection Agency regulates facilities with as little as 1,320 gallons, but an exact total on the number is not available. Anywhere two large cylinders stand near each other, that’s a tank farm.

Some of the state’s newest tank farm infrastructure expands capacity in two distinct ways. The projects serve radically different users in widely divergent locations, yet the builders had a similar mission when constructing them. Logistics firms Crowley and Colville both exercised caution and forethought to ensure these new additions to Alaska’s petroleum landscape are safe and will be around for a long time.

The Defense Logistics Agency Energy (DLA Energy) awarded Crowley a contract to build and operate a 500,000-barrel (approximately 21 million gallons) bulk fuel storage facility in North Pole to support Eielson Air Force Base and Fort Wainwright. The project is like one Crowley completed in 2011 for DLA Energy at the Port of Anchorage, now the Port of Alaska. That facility was doubled in size in 2015, now providing 1 million barrels of product storage for Joint Base Elmendorf-Richardson, just up the bluff from the port. Crowley is in the second five-year term of its operating contract.

For the North Pole project, Crowley was awarded the contract in July 2020. It was a “greenfield” facility, built from the ground up. Eighteen months later, the tanks and supporting infrastructure are operational.

A Colville tanker truck and tank farm in Deadhorse.

Judy Patrick

“The design is based on a really long lifespan,” says Scott Mulvihill, director of government operations and government services at Crowley. “There are tank farms, even within Alaska, that some of the tanks were built in the 1900s—1914, 1920. Those tanks are still in service, so when you construct it, you’re not looking at a window that would be less than fifty years. You want to get a lot of life out of it.” This farm was built to stand up against corrosion, earthquakes, and wind and water damage. With durability in mind, Crowley used materials with a long life expectancy, and Mulvihill says maintenance plans include but are not limited to “painting, valve cycling, lubrication of facilities, pump replacement, [and] valve replacement.”

While Crowley has experience with tank farms and similar infrastructure, this project “represents a new capability that doesn’t exist today,” according to Crowley Maritime Vice President Sean Thomas.

The main challenge was the available water on location for testing the facility and in case of fire. The groundwater on location is unsuitable for those purposes, so part of the design went to creating a facility that could hold the necessary water volume. While this is a normal part of the design of tank farms, it “becomes somewhat problematic at -40°F, since water becomes a giant ice cube,” says Thomas. To solve this problem, the design and contracting teams built a pumphouse building with a concrete holding tank inside to hold 100,000 gallons of water. The floors are hydronically heated to maintain the water temperature, and, as Mulvihill explains, the design of the pumphouse is “very new, maybe number one in the state” in terms of innovation for storing water.

Employees for this new tank farm are all from the local area, which is how Crowley likes to hire. Crowley also relied on Alaska-based design and construction partners: Enterprise Engineering and Latitude 63, both based in Anchorage, and approximately 95 percent of all subcontractors for the project are local Alaska businesses.

For Crowley, the most important feature of the tank farm is that it “further solidifies our strength and capability in providing these types of services to the US military around the world,” Thomas says. He sees his company’s government services team expanding out, discovering “new opportunities like this elsewhere on the globe.”

Defense logistics were the original reason Crowley Maritime entered Alaska, servicing early-warning radar stations in the late ‘50s. A decade later, when oil was discovered at Prudhoe Bay, Crowley was already experienced at barging cargo and bulk petroleum to the Arctic coast. Crowley has since sold its Prudhoe Bay sealift assets to Cook Inlet Tug & Barge, a subsidiary of Foss Maritime. Meanwhile, on shore, Prudhoe Bay logistics have become the bailiwick of Colville, Inc.

“We supply fuel to several of the oil companies up there [on the Slope] that are producing oil,” says Roger Bock, senior director of operations at Colville. The company’s Prudhoe Bay tank farm can store approximately 220,000 barrels, or 4.6 million gallons, which is adequate for the short term, but Colville wanted to increase the efficiency of transferring fuel within their storage capabilities without building new tanks.

According to Bock, 4.6 million gallons “may seem like a lot of storage, but it’s really just a drop in the bucket compared to the amount of gallons that get moved up there on a yearly basis, just to be able to put oil in the pipeline for Alaska.”

When Colville first started to map out an expansion, an assessment of the needs of the community and their customer base determined that it didn’t need more storage tanks.

Instead, the project Colville moved forward with was a combination of increased efficiency and safety on the “offload and load lanes at the rack.” Bock says the problem was that—even with a fleet capacity of thirty-six line haul trucks capable of hauling close to 500,000 gallons of fuel per week and fifteen tractors and dual tankers that can haul 16,000 gallons at once—the bottleneck at the offloading station was holding everything up. With only one unload and one delivery unit able to go out at a time, expanding the station was the logical next step.

“Let’s double it,” Bock says of Colville’s strategy. “We’ll have the capability to unload two tankers at once and load two delivery units at the same time, aiming for over 20,000 gallons unloaded and be able to load over 40,000 gallons in an hour or less.” By doubling the offload lanes, adding a new secondary containment structure that meets Alaska Department of Environmental Conservation standards, and expanding the piping in the truck tanker loading area to be able to load two trailers at the same time, Colville doubled their rate of moving fuel at Prudhoe Bay.

Bock states that “this project makes it so we can keep all the exploration companies up there finding the oil, producing the oil, and getting it put in the pipeline for Alaska’s economy.”

Bock adds that everything up on the Slope is “looked at with a fine microscope, so everything you do, you have to have 110 percent containment every time you transfer fuel.” The shop foreman on the expansion project, who has been promoted to project manager, put a lot of work into keeping the project safe, particularly in setting up a pumping system that is outfitted with several safeguards to prevent any environmental mishaps.

Safety is part of everything Colville does. “We like to go above and beyond,” Bock says. “We have the basic list we check off regularly, but we also like to use our own steps to keep everyone vigilant. Every year we do a spill drill; we fully deploy, shut down the pad, put up a security zone, and have the whole team working as if it’s a live fire drill.”

For Colville, the benefits of this project are all about efficiency, safety, and an excellent reputation as a fuel-moving company going forward. Bock says this “opens the door for companies not to have to worry about their fuel needs. It gives them an efficient, more reliable service” and a “more sustainable way for exploration companies to get up there and do their work.” He’s proud that Colville has never run out of fuel on the North Slope, and on this project, most of the work was done in-house.

While expanding the tank farm itself isn’t off the table for future projects, Colville’s new infrastructure has given the company the security it is looking for and these improvements will already be in place to move fuel for everyone in need on the Slope.