Seattle firm warned BP about pipeline problems in ‘01

SEATTLE – A Seattle-based engineering firm raised a red flag more than four years ago concerning BP’s monitoring of its Alaska oil pipelines.

The draft report by Coffman Engineers, published in November 2001, is among documents being reviewed by a federal grand jury in Anchorage, which is investigating a March oil spill of more than 200,000 gallons from a west Prudhoe oil field pipe.

The final report, however, was significantly toned down after the company responded to the draft, the documents showed.

The grand jury is looking into possible criminal violations of the federal Clean Water Act, which carries penalties for negligent conduct that leads to an oil spill.

The company also has cited corrosion problems as the cause of small leaks and other damage that triggered a partial shutdown of BP’s Prudhoe Bay operations earlier this month.

The Coffman documents were made public Friday on the Project on Government Oversight Web site by Charles Hamel, a former oil broker who is a watchdog of Alaska’s oil industry.

Coffman officials, in interviews earlier this week with the Seattle Times, said there were numerous initial discussions about what should be included in the reports. But they said they never felt any pressure to censor their report.

“I am not aware of any coercion or otherwise that took place to get us to change that report,” said Harold Hollis, a Coffman vice president in Anchorage, who declined to discuss report details because of the grand jury investigation.

On Friday, the company said the initial Coffman report contained errors that BP pointed out in its response. “We were all working together to provide information that would be of value. We feel this kind of give-and-take is important,” said Steve Rinehart, a BP Alaska (Exploration) spokesman.

Hamel, in a letter sent Aug. 22 to the federal Office of Pipeline Safety, accused BP of “whitewashing” away criticism.

The 2001 Coffman report questioned whether BP was using remote-operated devices that check for corrosion and other wear extensively enough. The report described the so-called “smart pigs” as “the only inspection technique capable of looking at the whole internal and external corrosion picture.” Most of the Coffman comments about “pigging” were eliminated from the final report, published early in 2002.

In the aftermath of last March’s spill, BP acknowledged that the transit lines in western Prudhoe Bay had gone without a smart-pig inspection since 1998, and it has been scrambling to make those inspections.

BP officials say workers have frequently pigged many other lines at Prudhoe Bay. But the transit lines appeared to be at low risk of corrosion compared with other lines that handled saltwater, gas and oil, and they say they thought monitoring efforts without pigging were adequate.

In the draft’s summary, Coffman offered little praise to BP. Instead, it chastised the oil company for a “reporting style” that makes it difficult to understand the company’s corrosion-monitoring strategy. The draft also said BP’s data were insufficient to compare the company’s program to industry peers. “No discussion of the underlying program strategy is included, other than to say, ‘Our corporate goals are no accidents, no harm to people and no damage to the environment,’ ” Coffman reported.

That and other concerns were dropped from the final report. The draft report triggered a sharply worded response from BP. In a memo sent to Coffman and the Alaska Department of Environmental Conservation, BP said the reviewers lacked balance and stressed problems rather than accomplishments. “The Coffman report presents many negative findings and characterizations and very few positive references” to information provided by BP, the company said.