Re: Alaska shutdown
This might help: From Tony Snow:
Q Tony, to what extent has the President gotten involved in this Alaska oil pipeline stoppage, and how concerned are you about the impact on people who are already hard-pressed by what they're already paying for gasoline?
MR. SNOW: A couple of points. Sam Bodman did a press conference on this not too long ago, and apparently, at this point, the supplies are -- we're actually in a pretty good supply situation, but he has also said that the Strategic Petroleum Reserve would be made available if necessary. But it looks like we're running some, like, 5 million barrels a day, in terms of supplies, better than we were at this point last year.
Having said that, what's going on, really, is the result of some actions the administration took a while ago. And I'll give you a little bit of a timetable that helps you put this in context. There was a leak discovered by a BP crew in March, on March 2nd. That's the first leak of the pipeline that we know of. Shortly after that, the pipeline and hazardous materials safety administration issued an enforcement action directing BP to improve corrosion management on some of those pipelines. Later on it followed up with a series of other guidelines, including trying to make sure that there was what they called pipeline inspection gauges -- PIGs, in the parlance -- to try to figure out the integrity of those pipelines. That led to the discovery a few days ago of weakness in some of the pipelines, which has led to the interruption.
Now, our first priority is to make sure that there is continued safe operation of the pipelines coming out of the North Slope. The Department of Transportation has a team of investigators onsite, right now, to assess the situation. They're going to have an evaluation. They are issuing new compliance orders -- statutorily you can do that -- and they've already issued two compliance orders, I just mentioned that, the one in March and a follow-on in July. They're going to outline steps that the company has to take to make sure that the pipelines are safe to be carrying oil.
We're happy that BP finally is making progress in addressing concerns which have been discussed with it in the past. And we're also in the process of accelerating the rule-making process that would enable the creation of a robust regulatory regime over those pipelines. As you probably know, the low-pressure pipelines -- and that's what these are, these are relatively low-volume pipelines -- have not had the kind of federal oversight that the high-volume pipelines have had. And the administration is working quickly to get that into place.
At this point, obviously -- we've also been working with -- we've had contact with the governments of Saudi Arabia and Mexico. If there are supply shortages, they have agreed to help us in trying to address those. At this point, no refineries have reported shortages in petroleum, but, obviously, if those become a factor, we will address it and address it vigorously and in a timely manner.
