BP pinches fuel line.

Byline: The Register-Guard

In a world that burns 85 million barrels of oil a day, the temporary shutdown of a 400,000-barrel supply line should cause no more than a hiccup. Yet when BP Exploration Alaska announced it was closing its transit pipeline at Prudhoe Bay until December for emergency repairs, prices jumped more than 3 percent and President Bush announced his readiness to tap the nation's strategic petroleum reserve. The effects of such a relatively minor kink in the fuel hose should warn Americans to prepare for a truly serious disruption.

BP allowed equipment at the Prudhoe Bay field, which supplies about half the oil carried by the trans-Alaska oil pipeline, to fall into a dangerous state of disrepair. The U.S. Transportation Department ordered that BP's transit pipelines be inspected after an oil spill last March became the biggest in the history of Alaska's North Slope. The inspection found that pipes had badly corroded, losing up to 81 percent of wall thickness. It's a good thing the corrosion was detected before another massive spill occurred.

BP officials say the corrosion came as a surprise; the company had not considered routine checks and maintenance necessary. Yet the Prudhoe Bay pipelines were initially designed to last 25 years - and that was 29 years ago. BP had gone 14 years without inspecting the pipes from the inside. Now the company, which reported a profit of $7.3 billion in its most recent quarter, will reap a windfall from higher prices on its remaining production. BP deserves no sympathy for its troubles.

Corporate corner-cutting is nothing new. What's new is a world in which oil supply and demand are so closely in balance, despite a tripling in prices over the past two years. High prices would ordinarily result in production increases, but the world's big suppliers are at or near capacity. High prices would also be expected to trigger a decline in demand, but that hasn't happened. There's so little slack in the system that even a small shock can cause ripples worldwide.

BP's Prudhoe Bay field accounts for about 8 percent of the United States' production. But the United States imports two barrels of oil for each one it produces. Venezuela, where President Hugo Chavez is an increasingly harsh critic of U.S. foreign policy, supplies the United States with more than three times as much oil as comes from Prudhoe Bay. Nigeria, where oil-producing regions are awash in corruption and violence, supplies nearly as much as Venezuela. Either nation has the potential to cause disruption that would dwarf the effects of BP's pipeline closure.

Worldwide, the top 15 oil producers include, in addition to Venezuela and Nigeria, such volatile nations as Saudi Arabia, Russia, Iran, Iraq and Algeria. A supply disruption in any of these countries would remove from the world market four to 22 times as much oil as was lost as a result of BP's interruption.

A reflexive response to such vulnerability is to call for increased domestic production, such as opening the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to drilling. The United States, however, can't drill its way to energy security. The Arctic refuge would produce at most 1 million barrels of oil a day - a significant amount, but enough to offset imports only marginally. And even if oil were flowing from the refuge, BP's pipeline shutdown would still have crimped domestic and world supplies.

More dramatic and immediate results could be obtained by reducing oil dependence through conservation, efficiency and the development of alternative energy sources. Americans should have been pursuing this course for a generation, but it's not too late. In a world of increasing competition for tight supplies, security can be found only in reduced dependence on oil.

When one corroded pipeline is all it takes to affect the cost and availability of Americans' next fix, the risks of what President Bush has described as the United States' addiction to oil become clear.