Construction surges despite a glut in natural gas
Seen from an airplane, it looks like a giant scar stretching across the Great Plains and over the horizon. For much of last summer, however, the scene featured countless lengths of steel pipe lying like uncooked spaghetti beside deep ditches. Here and there clusters of yellow machines and men in hard hats or baseball caps could be seen, many of them bare-chested under the hot sun, some working under the shade of umbrellas attached to the pipes.
The work is now nearly finished, and the result is a 793-mile stretch of natural gas pipeline that extends eastward from Whitney Canyon, Wyo., to a terminal in Beatrice, Neb. There the pipeline will become a part of existing gas lines leading to the population and industrial centers of the East, delivering 350 million cu. ft. of fuel per day to customers by Oct. 15. Named Trailblazer, because it is the first major pipeline to transport gas from the Rocky Mountain Overthrust Belt in western Wyoming directly to the Midwest, the $1.4 billion, 36-in. line is the work of five different interstate gas-transmission companies—Colorado Interstate Gas Co., Columbia Gulf Transmission Co., Mountain Fuel Resources, Inc., Northern Natural Resources Co. and Natural Gas Pipeline Co. of America. Together the firms already service one out of every four natural gas customers in the country. Their latest project is a part of what has become the biggest gas-pipeline building boom of its kind in the U.S. in 30 years.
From the dusty high plains of Montana to the fertile corn belt in eastern Iowa, workmen by the thousands have completed another and bigger project, the Northern Border Pipeline. The line reaches 823 miles from the Canadian border at Alberta to the Midwestern U.S., and by November will be transporting 975 million cu. ft. of fuel per day, or enough to heat 1.4 million homes in the dead of winter. Construction of the $1.1 billion system began in the spring of 1981, and has required on occasion as many as 5,000 hardhats and other workers, laboring at nine different sites along the route. Boasts Northern Border President William Henry: "This is the largest privately financed pipeline project ever undertaken, the largest of its kind in the free world."
Northern Border is only a segment of the Alaska Natural Gas Transportation System, a mammoth four-pipeline network intended to make Alaska's vast natural gas reserves available to the rest of the U.S. Expected to be completed by the end of the decade, the system will provide the country with enough fuel to heat 4.5 million homes per day at peak capacity. Though the pipeline has been plagued by financing problems and construction start-up delays, it is seen by industry experts as an important complement to the Trans-Alaska Pipeline System, which carries 1.5 million bbl. of crude oil per day from Prudhoe Bay on the Beaufort Sea to the port of Valdez, 800 miles to the south. All together, the entire gas-pipeline network is aimed at ensuring adequate fuel supplies for industrial and home-heating use until the turn of the century and beyond.