Construction of the Trans-Alaska Pipeline System first load of oil from the Trans-Alaska Pipeline System. When the TAPS group initially proposed the pipeline in 1969, the proposed cost was $900 million, and the pipeline would be completed by 1972. By January 1970, the projected cost had risen from $900 million to $2 billion. In October 1973, Alyeska further refined its figures and anticipated a cost of between $3.1 billion and $3.5 billion, with the potential for a billion more. One year later, Alyeska released its most detailed cost estimate to that point: $5.982 billion. By June 1975, that figure had again risen to $6.4 billion. At
Pipeline transport employee in Michigan. Although the Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration (PHMSA) has standard baseline incident frequencies to estimate the number of spills, TransCanada altered these assumptions based on improved pipeline design, operation, and safety. Whether these adjustments are justified is debatable as these assumptions resulted in a nearly 10-fold decrease in spill estimates. Given that the pipeline crosses 247 miles of the Ogallala Aquifer, or 14.5% of the entire pipeline length, and the 50-year life of the entire pipeline is expected to have between 11 – 91 spills, approximately 1.6 – 13.2 spills can be expected to occur over