Oil, pooled deep under Prudhoe Bay, offered the greatest Alaska treasure of all. Men had come to Alaska for furs and fish and for Gold. In 1968 men came for oil, and they found one of the top 20 oil fields ever discovered anywhere in the world.
Problem.
Prudhoe Bay and its vast pool of oil lay on the Artic Ocean, at the farthest northern edge of Alaska, a very long way from refineries and consumers. Getting the oil to tankers that could carry it out into the North Pacific and on to the world meant getting it across more than 800 rivers and streams and over three of the most rugged mountain ranges in the world.
Oil companies had a solution, seven of them would form the Alyeska Pipeline Service Company which would install a massive pipeline, four feet in diameter, from Prudhoe Bay south to the Port of Valdez at the edge of Prince William Sound.
Almost nobody but the oil companies liked the idea.
Men had tried constructing things—trails and roads—through Alaska before. A man named Abercrombie had struggled to build a trail for Gold Rushers through much of this same terrain back at the turn of the century with less than impressive results. A man named Richardson had struggled to improve some of the trail; left a rough highway that required constant repair and maintenance. The United States Army and a horde of civilian contractors had fought to build the Alaska Highway through a portion of it in 1942.
The challenges of the terrain, the vicious weather, the mud and the muskeg were no secret. Now Alyeska proposed to build a four-foot pipeline the entire length of it? Proposed to push not millions, but billions, of barrels of oil through it? The potential for an ecological catastrophe seemed obvious. Any break in that pipeline would inundate a large portion of the pristine top of the world with slimy crude oil.
In 1973 the Arabs changed everything.
In revenge against countries, including the United States, that had supported Israel during the Yom Kippur War, the Arabs stopped selling them oil. Prices skyrocketed. All over the United States drivers lined up for gas. Stations ran out. Towns and cities rationed gas. Some stations sold to cars with even numbered plates one day, odd numbered plates the next.
Alyeska began constructing the Trans-Alaska Pipeline System in 1975.
