Alaskan Pipeline construction

We had determined that we should be using submerged arc welding. Submerged arc welding is used for steel all the time. Big line pipe like the Alaskan pipeline was done by submerged arc. You have two plates, an inch thick, two inches thick, whatever, and you essentially feed in granular flux that looks sort of like sand. A wire feeds in, submerged underneath the flux of sand. You have an arc right there and you'll be standing next to it with no shielding, because it's all under the sand. It's a very special sand — like the coatings on these electrodes but in granular form. The process was developed in the United States about 1936. There's a letter from Churchill to FDR at the beginning of World War Two about a welding process — it was the Union Carbide Unionmelt process developed in 1936. This was one of the ways we built ships.

The US Navy found the plates that had the problems, that started the fractures in the Liberty ships, were on the average of about five foot-pounds. So one of the recommendations of that Navy inquiry was that the Navy require ten foot-pounds — they doubled the amount of fracture energy that they found empirically had caused problems. Then people decided, well, we should put a safety factor on top of the ten foot-pound, so they made it fifteen foot-pounds. By 1960, the Coast Guard had decided, well, we should put a bigger safety factor than just fifteen foot-pounds, we'll make it twenty foot-pounds. So now we're four times what the Navy found was causing problems. I remember when I was working at a steel company, and the guy in the office right next to me was in charge of what we call line pipe — the steel pipe for things like the Alaskan pipeline. They were building the Alaskan pipeline in the mid '70s, and they had plans to build other pipelines, and they wanted to have something that would really act tough, that tough steel, and they wanted sixty or seventy foot-pounds. It starts getting pricey to make steels that are that tough.

There have been cases — I've heard of cases — that there were small diameter pipelines, I don't know if they're 12 inch or whatever, where a crack would start and run for 30 miles in a buried pipeline, a brittle fracture. When I worked for Bethlehem Steel, they were starting to build the Alaskan pipeline, and Bethlehem Steel made big diameter pipe for pipelines, and there were other pipeline projects people were building in the world. The guy in the office right next to me was our pipeline expert at Bethlehem Steel. He was the one I think told me about the 30-mile-long running crack. They were looking at using inserts in the pipelines to prevent the fractures. Every couple of hundred yards they were going to weld in a heavy wall, high toughness steel. So this would be your regular pipe, but they might put a 12-inch-long piece that they would just weld in there that was thicker and very high toughness steel.

Brief mention — driver for raising Charpy minimum to 30 ft-lb, with 80 ft-lb proposed at one point.

It turns out it's not that big a deal, because what's happened over the years is we put safety factors on top of safety factors. That report I showed you from 1946 showed that the problem for the Liberty ships were Liberty ships that had less than 10 foot-pounds of toughness. So when they came out in the 1950s with requirements they said, we'll add another 5 foot-pounds — you have to have 15 foot-pounds minimum. That was through the 50s and 60s. Then starting in the 70s the Coast Guard decided, well, some people are playing games, we'll go to 20 as the minimum. And then when they started building pipelines in Alaska and places they said, let's go to 30. At one point they were talking about going to 80 foot-pounds minimum, which is just way beyond anything anyone would ever need. Hey, but if you're not paying for it and you're just regulating someone, you just tell them what to do. You don't care — it's their nickel, not yours.

Bethlehem Steel in the mid-70s wanted to use a 1% nickel HSLA precursor steel for the Alaskan Pipeline. Would have consumed a substantial fraction of world nickel supply.

So the Navy started looking in the 1980s and 90s at developing new steels — the HSLA steels. You have HSLA-60, HSLA-80, HSLA-100. The sub guys will not use anything but the HY steels for the hulls because they're conservative, and the surface ship guys will use whatever will give them more surface ships, which is the HSLA steels because they're more weldable. Back when I was working for Bethlehem Steel in the mid-70s, they wanted to use the precursor to the HSLA steels — which had one percent nickel in it — to build the Alaskan Pipeline. Nickel adds toughness, so you won't get brittle fractures. It would have used a substantial fraction of the nickel in the world to build that one pipeline. You can build a few ships, but when you start building whole pipelines it actually takes more steel than to build a few ships.