New Home for a Giant Plant

The voyage across the Pacific took six weeks, and no wonder. The ocean-going tug Arctic Shiko had quite a cargo to haul: a complete seawater treatment plant, longer than two football fields, 110 ft. high and weighing in at 26,000 tons. Built in South Korea and designed by Bechtel for Arco Alaska at a cost of $350 million, the STP has been floated into position in Alaska's Prudhoe Bay. Toward the end of the 4,000-mile journey, summer ice and high winds in the Bering Sea became a problem, but the huge plant managed to beat the feared September deadline, when the ice begins to thicken.

Once over its resting place, the barge under the plant was sunk in a dozen feet of water, forming a man-made foundation for the plant. When the STP finally starts working in mid-1984, it will help Arco, Sohio and nine other oil companies get more oil out of their North Slope wells. Water will be drawn into the plant at a rate of as much as 2.2 million bbl. a day, deoxygenated and heated from the Beaufort Sea's 28DEG to 40DEG. Then it will be pumped to another plant ten miles away, there to be heated to 80DEG and sent through a maze of 35 pipelines to injection wells in the oilfield.

Forced into the ground, the water will help push oil to the surface, its low oxygen content ensuring that microorganisms do not grow to inhibit the oil flow. Currently, the wells produce 1.5 million bbl. daily. The STP-processed water will guarantee that an additional 1 billion bbl. can be extracted from the sandstone beneath the Beaufort Sea before production slacks off in the 1990s. This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.